the toll of inflation

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:00 PM -0500 2/6/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 2/6/2009 07:12 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>>Victory in the Grapefruit Circuit usually doesn't mean much.  That
>>and a nickel still will get you on the subway.  NYTimes, March 22,
>>1946, p. 30.  Arthur Daley's column.
>>[referring to a boxing championship]  That and a dime will get
>>either of them in the subway. . . .  NYTimes, May 30, 1951, p.
>>31.  Also Arthur Daley's column.
>
>Yes -- and I was outraged when the fare went from a nickel to a
>dime.  (I had returned to the city from a summer at camp, and hadn't heard.)
>
>Joel
>
 From a slightly later generation, I remember well "That and 15 cents
will get you on the subway."  15 cents was annoying, since unlike the
earlier fare you needed two separate coins (or, worse, a whole
quarter).  I think it was around then that the theory was first
mooted about the correlation between subway fare and the cost of a
slice of pizza.  Has anyone revisited this with statistical evidence?
Of course the latter cost requires a bit of averaging over many many
pizza emporia...

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org