Word: manhattanization
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Metropolitan, the new low-budget film produced by Harvard graduate Whit Stillman, was something of a curiosity when it opened this August in Manhattan. It told a simple, quiet story of a small group of young New York socialites who spend the Christmas season attending debutante balls and engaging in witty banter at after-parties...
...more than a month, Metropolitan was shown only at one movie theater in the country, New York's Paris theater. Not surprisingly, notoriously solipsistic Manhattanites adored it. But despite its limited scope--Manhattan and its subsidiary, the Hamptons--Metropolitan supercedes regionalism and parochialism. This finely crafted film is sweetly anachronistic in an age of high-tech and high budget movies. It is a delightfully literate and sincere exploration of the death of the self-styled American aristocracy...
...Wells visited the great immigration center at Ellis Island, about a mile off the lower tip of Manhattan. The distinguished British writer and advance man for the future wanted to see for himself how arrivals from the Old World were ushered into the new one. He found the process strangely unceremonious. "On they go, from this pen to that," he wrote, "pen by pen, towards a desk at a little metal wicket -- the gate of America...
When I moved to New York, back in 1961, I remember saying that 90% of the people walking along the street in Manhattan would be interviewed in any other town, and the other 10% would be arrested. It's got a lot weirder since then...
...Yiddish word -- nobody thinks it's an English word -- but a Yiddish word and a New York word are the same thing. It's true that you can detect an Italian bounce to some New York phrases, and it's true that white students at expensive Manhattan private schools are as likely as Harlem teenagers to shout "Yo!" when they come across a friend, but I think the basic structure and inflection of the language New Yorkers speak owe their greatest debt to Yiddish. The only purely New York word I can think of -- cockamamie -- sounds Yiddish, even thought...