This may have been mentioned, but

[Laurence Horn]

I just saw "Barney's Version", a 2010 movie from a 1990's novel by Mordecai Richler (so you can predict Montreal, Jewish, Leonard Cohen songs on the soundtrack), with Paul Giamatti as Barney and Dustin Hoffman as his father.  (It was my choice of the airplane movie litter, and not bad at that.)  But the relevance here is a scene in which Barney has suddenly shown up in New York to woo a woman he met (at his own second wedding) and fallen in love with.  So they're walking in Central Park and, maybe out of nervousness or maybe to impress her, he begins a riff asking her whether she knows why The Big Apple is called "The Big Apple", and proceeds to tell her.  The amazing part is that he gets it right--John J. Fitz Gerald, the stable hands, everything--as if he'd cribbed it from Barry Popik's web site, Jerry Cohen's ads-l postings, or both.  Wonder what the story is there…

LH

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