Birthplace of “Dude”

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And looking through some old papers, I came across some notes that I made in 2007 for a documentary called The Joy of Lex.

Great title.

It aired on the Discovery Channel at the time.

It was super fun.

But the assignment that they gave me was to go to New York City and look at the F line on the subway and follow all the stops in the F line and gather up language from each stop, from the history of each neighborhood and borough.

And so I’ve got these notes, and I figured in the spirit of recycling that I could share some of this with you.

This is a very green show.

Yes, I’d love to hear some.

It’s an incredibly rich history.

I mean, we are talking about one of the major world cities, right?

Sure, yeah.

With millions of people.

Yeah.

For example, Gridlock comes from New York City.

Is that right?

Yeah, Gridlock Sam wrote for one of the newspapers and coined the term to refer to cars being stuck in the middle of an intersection.

Oh, no kidding.

Dude, of course, you probably knew that, comes from New York City in the 1800s.

Rotisserie baseball.

Rotisserie baseball.

I don’t know what that is.

It’s kind of like fantasy baseball.

Okay.

It’s kind of like that.

All right.

Hatchet man.

So the term for the political guy who goes out and deals with your political enemies, kind of behind the scenes, comes from New York City.

Panhandler.

Yeah.

Another term for somebody asking for money.

Yeah.

Bag lady probably comes from New York City.

And best of all, Waldorf salad.

Yes, I knew that from the hotel.

But I wanted to tell you my favorite New Yorkism that came from this work that I did along the F line in New York City.

And it’s a joke that waiters and bartenders would say when they handed you a glass of water.

As if they were handing you, say, two fingers of rye neat in a glass.

They would say, here, have one on the city.

It’s just this dumb joke that lasted for the longest time in New York City.

I like it.

I don’t know if anyone’s still using it, but there we go.

A little bit of the color of New York City.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, we know that there’s language particular to the place and the time that you’re in.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.