Why can’t Cecil get his facts straight about the origin of the nickname “Big Apple” and mention John J. Fitz Gerald? My work is on the Web page of the Museum of the City of New York, and I dedicated “Big Apple Corner” at Broadway and W. 54th Street. Why can’t Cecil mention this? –Barry Popik
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In a 1977 column about the origin of “Big Apple” I wrote, “Of the many theories advanced, the most reasonable seems to be that the phrase originated in showbiz circles. ‘There are many apples on the tree,’ an old saying supposedly runs, ‘but only one Big Apple.’ [So] vaudevillians, jazzmen, and other wormy entertainment types dubbed New York, the most important performing venue of them all, the Big Apple.” Not the world’s most compelling answer, but pretty much the consensus among etymologists at the time.
Fitz Gerald said he’d first heard the phrase on a trip to New Orleans to see one Jake Byers:
Not everyone accepts Popik’s explanation as the final word even now. By his own account, John J. Fitz Gerald didn’t invent the nickname, he merely popularized it. In The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech (1993), Irving Lewis Allen quotes a 1909 comment by one Martin Wayfarer: “New York [was] merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other….[But] the big apple [New York] gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.” A nonce usage, Popik says; there’s no evidence “Big Apple” was in common use before 1920. Then again, those stable hands knew what it meant. Be that as it may, Popik has helped advance human knowledge, and Cecil is happy to give credit where it’s due. Maybe next week we’ll have room for his exposé on the origin of “Windy City.”
