[Ads-l] "The Big Easy"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 8:06 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> On Mar 5, 2019, at 7:00 PM, Geoffrey Nunberg <nunbergg at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > Actually, after 35 or so years here I just call it the City now, though
> I have to be

> careful when returning to Manhattan, where the City is just, you know,
> the City.

> (My students at Brooklyn College used to call Manhattan the City.)


> The New York Times dialect quiz (Josh Katz et al.) included “the City” in
> their survey and came up with the result, displayed in the relevant map at
> this site--
>
> https://tinyurl.com/y5leopdb
>
> [you may need to scroll down]--that it mostly refers to New York, which
> surprised me, since as Geoff notes it’s a rather standard sobriquet for San
> Francisco not just in the general Bay Area but outward to states
> neighboring Northern California and beyond. The aforementioned Herb Caen
> liked to boast in his column about various individuals living there who
> received a letter at some point mailed to them at “The City” (without city
> or state otherwise identified) from the east coast, the Midwest, etc.  (Of
> course even if his reports were accurate we don’t know how many such
> envelopes were returned to sender or lost somewhere in New York.) It may
> also be worth noting that the (champion pro basketball team) Golden State
> Warriors, whose name doesn’t even mention S.F. and who play in Oakland (for
> now—their new arena will be located in S.F.), have one of their rotating
> home jerseys adorned with “The City”, also available as a souvenir for
> fans: https://www.warriorsteamstore.com/Collections/TheCity/.  I’m pretty
> sure neither the Manhattan-based Knicks nor the Brooklyn-based Nets have a
> “City” jersey, although I confess I haven’t been watching too many of their
> games.
>

Josh Katz based his work on the Harvard Dialect Survey by Bert Vaux and
Scott Golder. Here is there original survey question with the nationwide
results:

https://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_95.html
95. What is "the City"?
a. New York City (46.99%)
b. Boston (2.60%)
c. DC (2.25%)
d. LA (1.88%)
e. Chicago (4.57%)
f. other (41.72%)
(9965 respondents)

Too bad San Francisco was never one of the named choices. (Josh Katz's maps
are even more limited, only displaying the top three: NYC, Chicago, and
Boston.) But if you look at the responses from California, you can divine
that S.F. must be the overwhelming choice in the "other" category.

https://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/state_CA.html
95. What is "the City"?
a. New York City (17.58%)
b. Boston (0.06%)
c. DC (0.33%)
d. LA (16.03%)
e. Chicago (0.45%)
f. other (65.55%)

--bgz

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