Andrew Keh reports in the NY Times (archived) about a divergence in pronunciation that astounds me as much as if you told me a lot of people pronounced New York “NYE-rock”:
New Yorkers, among other neuroses, can be particular about the local vernacular.
You wait on line, not in line. The subway goes uptown or downtown, not north or south. And “the city” never, ever refers to the whole city — just Manhattan.
But for some reason, no matter how many times they’ve ridden the Long Island Rail Road out to Jones Beach or back and forth between Midtown and Ronkonkoma, New Yorkers can’t agree on how to pronounce it. The evidence has been on everyone’s lips since about 3,500 L.I.R.R. workers went on strike on Saturday. “There are a lot of things to debate and to discuss right now,” said Shekar Krishnan, a City Council member representing parts of Queens, including Woodside, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. “But there’s one thing that’s not debatable: We say Lurr.”
Try telling that to Kieran McShane, 69, a retiree who spent almost 40 years catching the 6:09 a.m. train from Babylon to Penn Station, the whole time calling it the L-I-R-R — each letter enunciated individually. “Now, I know certain people say L-I-double R,” he said. “But I’d never say that.”
Mr. McShane’s tolerance for alternate vocalizations was truly tested, then, when a reporter informed him that some pronounced the letters of L.I.R.R. as a monosyllabic word. “What?! Really?!” he said, before shouting to his wife in the other room: “Anne! Have you ever heard it called the Lurr?” After a beat, a woman’s voice crackled over the phone: “Never!”
Such confusion on Monday rang out across L.I.R.R. territory. People who said it one way were perplexed that anyone could, would, say it differently. […]
The pronunciations divergence has even the experts puzzled. Michael Newman, a professor of linguistics at Queens College, noted that L.I.R.R. was an initialism while Lurr was an acronym.
“Why something becomes an initialism when it could be pronounced as an acronym is weird,” he said, noting that the City University of New York, CUNY, was pronounced kyoo-nee, but its state counterpart, SUNY, was soo-nee. “I don’t know why it happens.”
Disputes over pronunciation are not uncommon in New York. As an example, Cecelia Cutler, a professor of linguistics at Lehman College in the Bronx, cited the various phonetic approaches to the name Schermerhorn, with sherm, skerm and skim all receiving significant usage.
On L-I-R-R, there may never be harmony, either. Mr. Krishnan, the city councilman, said his own office was starkly divided on the issue.
“I think it’s a Queens thing to say Lurr,” he said. “And I think people in Long Island say L-I-R-R or L-I-double R. That’s my working theory.”
If only it were that simple. Because others insist it should be called The Railroad. And then there are those call who say L-I-R, apparently believing the last letter is superfluous.
Doug Pearsall, 65, the owner of Eastern Front Brewing Co., in Mattituck on Long Island’s North Fork, who can see an L.I.R.R. train station through the front door of his business, said he didn’t agree with any of the pronunciations.
“We all just call it The Train,” he said. “It’s just the way to get into the city. Or the way to drink on the way to Greenport, so you don’t get a D.U.I.”
That last word he pronounced dewy.
I’m with McShane: it’s L-I-R-R, end of story. If some people want to say “Lurr,” that’s their business, but I never heard it in my 23 years in NYC and I don’t care to. It turns out there are limits to my descriptivism. (For what it’s worth, I say SKER-merhorn, but I accept the variants cheerfully.) Thanks, Eric!
Wait, are NBC and FBI not acronyms in rarefied linguistic circles? That’s a level of pedantry I hadn’t run into.
LIRR ran a twitter poll in 2023, and reported:
L I R R 36%
L I double R 32%
Lurrr 17%
Long Island Railroad 15%
Myself, I grew up on Long Island, just a couple of miles from the Queens border, and later lived in the city. Never heard “lurr” in my life.
I grew up on the Port Washington line. (c. 1952-1970s.)
My father commuted on the L I R R to and from work in Manhattan. I never heard LUR until today.
In adulthood I commuted from Fairfield County, CT. We didn’t call it Metro North or even the old New Haven Railroad. It was the train.
I feel like we need a Queens-born-and-bred commenter to chime in, since “that’s how they say it in Queens” is broadly consistent with “no one outside of Queens is very aware of Queens-specific pronunciations.”
My own sense of how it’s pronounced is consistent with hat’s, but when i moved off the island of Manhattan I moved into Metro-North territory. I’m not certain but I think when you’re on a subway approaching Penn Station (or these days Grand Central as well) the robot voice tells you you can change here for the Long Island Rail Road*, robotically enunciating each word in full.
ETA: Of course, now I realize I don’t know where cuchuflete grew up since “on the Port Washington line” doesn’t actually specify “near one of the line’s last four stops in Nassau County” versus “near one of the more numerous closer-in stops in Queens.” Although of course an isogloss would not need to perfectly track the city line – those folks in Douglaston/Little Neck might well have talked like suburbanites regardless of their formal political status.
*That’s the formal name, which may just reflect that “rail” and “road” were not yet consistently smushed orthographically into “railroad” as of the 1830’s, although some sources suggest that the original corporate name had hyphenated “Rail-Road.”
In addition to the Queens thing, it’s also possible that some of this is generational, since I know that hat, cuchuflete, and I are of a certain age, and I suspect that J.W. Brewer is not so young either. Mr. Krishnan, on the other hand, hadn’t even been born yet when I moved away from NY.
CUNY, was pronounced kyoo-nee, but its state counterpart, SUNY, was soo-nee.—that pair is hardly the clearest an example of weird difference. Neither is an initialism. The absence of syoo-nee is just phonotactics. I’m guessing Prof Newman was gamely answering an unsolicited phone call, reached helpfully for a New York–specific example, kept going without double-checking its relevance. Perhaps he is now reading the article and saying “shoot”.
Further to Jon W.’s point, Queens has undergone fairly dramatic demographic transformation within his (and my) lifetime. Something like 48% of its current population was born outside the U.S. and another big chunk are US-born descendants of immigrants who had not yet come to the U.S. let’s say 60 years ago and who in many cases are of ethnic/national origins that were not yet present in substantial numbers in or near Queens 60 years ago.* So you might not expect any Queens-specific linguistic quirks of today to be the same as they were in Jon W’s childhood.
On CUNY/SUNY I might say that it’s the presence of kyoo-nee that’s just phonotactics but of course I may unlike mollymooly speak an English in which yod-dropping is more the rule than the exception.
*Wikipedia lists all the other Democratic candidates Mr. Krishnan had to beat in a 2021 primary on his way to public office, and there’s nary an Irish-looking or Italian-looking or Ashkenazic-looking one in the lot, although those were the surnames that generally dominated Queens politics until fairly recent decades.** (Instead it’s Chen, Tran, Quiroz, Baryab, Melo, Perez, and Salgado.) Although it’s the sort of district where it’s pretty hard for the Democratic nominee to lose, he then still had to get by candidates surnamed Haque and Jaswal (plus Baryab again, running on a minor-party line) in the general election. Some of these candidates are from ethnic groups that noted Fictional Queens Resident Archie Bunker was probably never scripted as being bigoted against!
**To be fair there are also immigrant groups with “WASPy-looking” surnames, as witness current Borough President Mr. Richards (Jamaican-American) and his 2001-2013 predecessor Ms. Marshall (Guyanese-American).
i’ve never heard “lur”; i’ve lived in manhattan, brooklyn, and very briefly the bronx (though i worked in south astoria for a long time). i have friends in queens, but i see more LIRR trains out my livingroom window near the elevated tracks in brooklyn in a month than i suspect any of them see in a year.
i do wonder about generational shifts in these things, though. i’ve noticed that some of the younger folks i know say /kuni/ rather than /kjuni/ – though i think they’re mainly not nyc-raised.
are NBC and FBI not acronyms
נעבעך!
phoebe!
and perhaps this is my moment to decry the tendency to pronounce big balls’ former employer, DOGE, in the venetian manner of the meme that the fascist edgelords were trying to reference, rather than as “doggie”, which if widely adopted in the media would have knocked them out of the action within a week – they are the embodiment of inability to take a joke.
similarly, the only thing anyone should have been calling the “operation” that euphemized the current bipartisan regime’s war on iran is “Operation Epic Fail”.
where are the posters danton?! o tempura! o morays!
@jwb
I admire your choice of the word “chunk” in that sentence, where a simple typo could have lead you to disaster.
that pair is hardly the clearest an example of weird difference. Neither is an initialism.
Yeah, I thought that was odd too. I like your exegesis.
Lrrr.
Nonononono, Operation Epic Furious – Strait to Hell.
“If you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray;
if it goes for your leg
and breaks it like an egg,
that’s a moray!
If its mouth opens wide
and there’s another inside,
that’s a moray;”
and then I couldn’t remember the possibly 4th stanza, so I googled it and found a lot more.
J.W. Brewer : one of my friends (very WASP-y) moved out of Queens, here to Bulgaria in the last ten years. Another two (what America defines as black) did from the south side of Chicago. Another did from Baton Rouge. Another did from Arizona. (the latter two very much what the US defines a white).
The only person with the surname Cuny I ever met pronounced it with an /u/. He was not a New Yorker, as I recall.
I thought the CUNY/SUNY thing wasn’t really relevant either. I wondered if CUNY being Kyoo-Nee has anything to do with alternate pronunciations flirting a little too close to one of our most impolite words.
The Royal Automobile Association is a South Australian motorists’ club established in 1903 that provides roadside assistance to members and many other benefits. Its abbreviation is RAA, and I have always (since my 1960s childhood) heard it called ‘R-A-A’. A few years ago, I started hearing ‘R-double-A’, which just sounds odd to me, and it doesn’t seem to make sense because it is an extra syllable to say.
When email addresses and URLs started to be talked about, I was surprised to hear the full stop (period) glyph being called ‘dot’, but I soon realised that it was so smart because it is short and descriptive for spoken reference, and it differentiates from the full stop (period) which has a space (or two) after it. Another option, ‘point’, as in ‘two-point-five’ for 2.5, was a possibility, but ‘point’ seemed to be more associated with numbers.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has the abbreviation GBRMPA which I have heard pronounced approximately as ‘g-bruhm-pah’ (the ‘g’ is hard), which is a fun thing to say. I used to modify it a little, deepening my voice and almost rhyming it with ‘oompah’. Somehow it would set off my youngest sister, early primary at the time, who would end up literally rolling on the floor laughing.
I don’t suppose anyone until this moment has thought of calling MIT “mitt”.
Cuny is indeed a well-attested surname, including in the history of linguistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Cuny Some will want to check out his _Recherches sur le vocalisme, le consonantisme et la formation des racines en « nostratique », ancêtre de l’indo-européen et du chamito-sémitique._
For a Welsh angle, there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cuny, variously a soldier, an MP, and High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire.
> I’m guessing Prof Newman was gamely answering an unsolicited phone call, reached helpfully for a New York–specific example, kept going without double-checking its relevance. Perhaps he is now reading the article and saying “shoot”.
Whether that’s the case or not, it should really be Keh saying “Shoot”. A journalist should catch this.
> speak an English in which yod-dropping is more the rule than the exception
Wondering what English that is. I’d venture that [ju] for “long u” is more frequent than [u] even in AmE which has more yod-dropping than most other Englishes.
> I wondered if CUNY being Kyoo-Nee has anything to do with
I don’t understand. Isn’t that by far the most natural reading, with single n triggering long u?
Apart from the irrelevance to initialisms, I really struggled trying to understand what, if anything, Prof Newman (or Keh?) thought was noteworthy about the CUNY/SUNY pronunciations. (For what it’s worth from a non-native) they seem like the most natural ones. I’m wondering if these don’t rhyme in Newman’s perception, with the yod-long-u being fronted and the no-yod-long-u being more back (or something like that), causing a “haha, they’re spelled similarly, but their pronunciation is so different!”-effect…
Or maybe he wanted to contrast CUNY with CCNY and got mixed up? As it stands, it really doesn’t make sense.
a well-attested surname
Also Cooney (of Irish origin).
Coney for rabbit, of dubious connection to the Island/Diners/hot dog (since we’re in NY).
The Internet tells me that Cuny < Alsatian Kühni, diminutive of Konrad (bearing in mind that name origins is the one subject The Internet is wrong about more than any other.)
Lrrr
not to be confused with delany’s Lll.
but we’ve only just arrived at 2 Epic 2 Furious, now that there might be a need to keep within the letter of the law’s time requirements…
Mollymooly:
“CUNY, was pronounced kyoo-nee, but its state counterpart, SUNY, was soo-nee.—that pair is hardly the clearest an example of weird difference. Neither is an initialism. The absence of syoo-nee is just phonotactics. I’m guessing Prof Newman was gamely answering an unsolicited phone call, reached helpfully for a New York–specific example, kept going without double-checking its relevance. Perhaps he is now reading the article and saying “shoot”.”
I think what happened here is poor organization on the part of the author, not the professor. I believe the professor probably gave CUNY and SUNY as examples of initialisms that DO become acronyms, as background for their discussion on how odd it is when initialisms fail to become acronyms. But the author did not relate these two statements in order.
By way of illustration:
“The professor said that it’s strange when graduates fail to find gainful employment, pointing to Steve and Linda, two graduates who are gainfully employed.”
I don’t understand. Isn’t that by far the most natural reading, with single n triggering long u?
As a non-New Yorker, I believe I would have pronounced it Koo-Nee rather than Kyu-Nee. Not sure if either of those would be more technically correct though. There’s no logical way it should be pronounced Kun-Nee, which is where you start getting awfully close to one of the most taboo words in American English.
I’m in my twenties and grew up on LI in Suffolk county. Never in my life have I heard it earnestly called the ‘lurr’. The only time I’ve heard that was in a joke about how to make LIers mad (alongside calling the ‘L.I.E.’ the ‘lie’).
Ryan: NBC and FBI are absolutely not acronyms. Unless you’re Kelly Bundy.
(Apologies for not finding a better version of that clip)
I have no dog in this fight, but I note that those who go with “the train” are being parochial, as if they are such hicks that they think there is only one. “The train” is fine for informal contexts where there is no ambiguity about which train you mean, but don’t imagine this to be what it is called in any grander sense.
@Yuval: The oldest sense of acronym, according to the OED, is:
That’s attested from 1940. Only in the last few years have I started to see the unjustified peeve that only the other sense (which is almost contemporaneous, attested from 1943) of acronym is correct.
It’s not inconsistent with JW’s narrative about immigration to assume that immigrants in Queen, with perhaps limited social contact to natives in Long Island and Manhattan, have simply adopted what to them is the logical pronunciation. I expect we will see more local shibboleths disappear in the future.
FWIW, in Hebrew one might call this kind of complaining… lirlur.
[Brett: the goal of my reply to Ryan was mostly to color myself as a member of the “rarefied circles”. Of course I’m familiar with common usage.]
Ben Zimmer wrote “Acronym,” On Language, NYT, Dec. 16, 2010:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19FOB-onlanguage-t.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j1A.hWWs.JrEUih1fQL6O&smid=url-share
That’s not some of Zimmer’s better work, calling the older, initialism sense of the word a “watered-down version.” The OED says acronym came to (originally American) English from German, but I don’t have a sense of which, if either, meaning is preferred in German.
I have no dog in this fight, but I note that those who go with “the train” are being parochial, as if they are such hicks that they think there is only one. “The train” is fine for informal contexts where there is no ambiguity about which train you mean, but don’t imagine this to be what it is called in any grander sense.
Ok. I’ve been called worse and for cause.
A bit of context- The train, a.k.a., Metro North, ran many dozens of times daily between my Fairfield County, CT., town and Grand Central. Thousands of riders used it to commute from ‘burb to City. Running on some of the same tracks were very occasional (three or four daily?)
Amtrack milk trains, slow and stopping at towns large and small. Finally, the Metroliner, Amtrak’s attempt at high speed rail, stopping only at the largest cities.
Unless one specified Amtrack, which might have stopped infrequently at my town, or the Metroliners, that assuredly did not, whizzing by without a thought to collecting or discharging passengers, was the train. Your most parochial and obedient servant.
C
I think the distinction between “initialism” and narrow-sense “acronym” is a quite useful one, but it does no particular good to peeve about how Normal People have consistently used broad-sense “acronym” to mean both from the earliest (relevant) times. Make up a new technical-jargon synonym for narrow-sense “acronym” if you want to avoid any risk of ambiguity.
Most Germans probably don’t know Akronym. The DUDEN Deutsches Universalwörterbuch says “aus den Anfangsbuchstaben mehrerer Wörter gebildetes Kurzwort” and gives the example EDV for “elektronische Datenverarbeitung”. The Wahrig Wörterbuch has the same definition, and “Agfa” as an example; and it gives the synonym Initialwort. My impression is that those people in Germany who know the word (and who don’t simply say Abkürzung), don’t give a damn about the various kinds of Akronym.
I think where I live now you will generally be understood if you say “the train” to mean “the commuter line that stops in our town and is operated by Metro-North” because what other train would you mean? But you would use “Metro-North” if you are complaining about the bureaucracy rather than the literal vehicle moving down the tracks. And if you are referring to the literal vehicle in a complaining mode you would probably do the same because it may seem more constructive to blame humans than inanimate objects for the inanimate object’s failure to perform to your expectations.
Note FWIW that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_L%26N_Don%27t_Stop_Here_Anymore presupposes a situation where the only trains that ever stopped there previously were from the named railroad, yet the specification adds something that “the train don’t stop here anymore” would lack. And of course maybe some of the intended audience is from far enough away that they shouldn’t be presumed to know which railroad has stopped serving that particular location.
J.W. Brewer: I feel like we need a Queens-born-and-bred commenter to chime in,
Maybe you could ask the current tenant of the White House. There aren’t a lot of things he knows, but he may know that.
> I believe I would have pronounced it Koo-Nee
Oh, that’s interesting, I can’t think of any words where “cu” is pronounced [ku], except for loanwords like “Cupertino” and “barracuda”.
Elsewhere the pet peeve of a descriptivist was mentioned. Here’s mine: I hate initialisms. If you think Japanese morpheme homophony is bad, try corporate initialism speak. A sub-language with only 26 syllables. Acronyms (in the narrow sense) at least have a bit of personality. Initialisms trick you into believing you might know what they mean. On day one of my tenure as Language Dictator of English I will introduce Russian/German-style abbreviations. AuTelMa and TraLaySec are pronounceable, just as short (to pronounce) as ATM and TLS, and actually convey some information.
It would never have occurred to me to call a train service by a company’s name. You just go and get the train to Glasgow (or Newcastle, or wherever).
If I was annoyed with e.g. Scotrail specifically then I would say so, but I couldn’t *catch* Scotrail. If I had to catch one company’s train rather than another’s I would have to say ‘an LNER train’, or whoever it was.
I would also have gone for ‘coo’, which when I think about it isn’t uncommon in Scottish placenames – Cupar and Culross and Kirkcudbright and Peterculter (versus Cumbernauld and Cumnock and Culloden!)
“Cue” for me, like cue, cube, cucumber, cumulative, and cute (but “culinary” has various pronunciations). I suppose the jokes about CUNYifform have been made.
Culross
And thus I learn that this is pronounced /ˈkurəs/. Whodathunkit!
From that Wikipedia article:
Saint Serf!
@JeninEd: In Great Britain, all the various railroads were consolidated into a single government-owned monopoly (British Rail) after WW2 and it stayed that way for many decades before efforts at privatization and decentralization were experimented with, but with I am given to understand fairly frequent renaming and rebranding tweaks of individual chunks of the national system because of practical difficulties experienced with the new post-BR order. So it would make a certain cultural sense for the transient names of local BR successor brands not to be very deeply embedded in people’s active lexicons.
In the U.S., by contrast, railroad nationalization never happened for the (sometimes profitable) freight business* and when the (historically always money-losing) passenger business became subject to government takeover there was one new nationwide entity (Amtrak) for your longer-distance lines but multiple separate ones for more local/commuter lines – indeed there are at least three different current entities (including the LIRR) handling different sets of commuter lines into Manhattan (some but not all of which also carry Amtrak trains traveling further) depending on which direction you are coming from. So the variation in company/entity names never completely lost its salience outside of contexts where only one could possibly be relevant.
*There has been considerable consolidation of the freight lines over the last maybe 70 years, but I don’t know whether current teenagers who live where I did as a teen 40+ years ago call the nearby tracks carrying freight trains the CSX tracks or e.g. the “old B&O tracks” reflecting their preconsolidation identity. I would more naturally call them the latter but that may not have been passed on to subsequent generations. They are reasonably close (less than 2 miles) to the roughly parallel current Amtrak tracks passing through the same area so there’s a motivation to be more specific than “the train tracks somewhere nearby.”
Come to think of it, one of the reasons “lurr” is so odd is because there used to be LOTS of U.S. railroads commonly referred to with initials of their full name but they were almost invariably pronounced as initialisms not narrow-sense acronyms. The only exception I can think of is that the old MKT or MK&T was familiarly known as the “Katy”* (from KT – there are apparently historical reasons why people felt free to ignore the M back in the 1890’s …). Were there any others?
I suppose some might think that Katy and KT might be homophonous, but they aren’t because the stress pattern differs.
*As referenced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Caught_the_Katy
US commuter U-Bahn/S-Bahn acronyms include BART. SEPTA, PATCO, PATH. MARTA.
I think we’ve talked about Teneu before – she’s also the Enoch of St Enoch station in Glasgow, bizarrely.
St Serf’s is a school that a friend of mine used to teach in, so it doesn’t sound all that odd to me except in the sense that Catholic schools generally sound more exotic!
On trains, I hadn’t really taken in that the US named trains were the name of a physical track, rather than a service running on it. ‘The train’ isn’t parochial here, it’s more that all trains are one – I don’t know if once upon a time people would have talking about taking ‘the GWR’.
I haven’t been in London enough to know if the DLR is a current UK example – ‘the underground’ or ‘the tube’ is definitely a different thing from ‘the train’, but although the London underground lines have individual track names I don’t think they’re used in that way.
And investigating Saint Serf turns out to be worthwhile too:
mollymooly’s examples are interesting because they are all recent-ish (very broadly speaking, meaning not much older than me …) and all are government agencies that in most cases (BART was new construction) took over one or more previously-privately-operated routes. E.g. the PATH train (pronounced like “path” rather than as an initialism) took over the old H&M (initialism) routes in 1962 following the H&M’s insolvency. So the new genre had notably different onomastic conventions than the old. The name of SEPTA is arguably unfortunate because it enables vulgar wordplay by critics like (actual newspaper headline) “SEPTA headed for the septic tank.”
NB: that the “H” stands for “Hudson” in both PATH and H&M but in the case of the former it is clearly the Hudson River whereas in the case of the latter it might be Hudson County, New Jersey although I’m not 100% certain of that.
Saith Wikipedia: “The routes of the PATH system were originally operated by the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (H&M), built to link New Jersey’s Hudson Waterfront with New York City.”
Saint Serf
Not to be confused with Saint Serif, patron saint of posters and, by extension, message boards and computer screens.
Poor Clare has been the patron saint of television since 1957.
in new york city, but also more generally, i use “the train” to refer to anything that runs on tracks, whether the particular route i’m talking about is the subway, a commuter line, or an intercity service – generally, i think, i’m assuming that the person i’m talking with knows which line it would be from the context; the core contrast is with traveling by bus, ferry, bicycle, car, or on foot (also generally clear from the context).
i only use the names of the specific carriers when there are several possibilities: taking the LIRR to JFK airport, rather than the A train; taking the subway to the Bronx Botanic Garden rather than Metro-North; going to philadelphia on the frankensteined [New] Jersey Transit to SEPTA combination rather than Amtrak; etc. because i was raised by diasporic new yorkers of a certain type, i’m also one of the youngest people i know who’ll refer to the IRT (and, less often, the IND and BMT) in that way to clarify a subway route – today, for instance, i’m planning to take the west side IRT to the village (that is, the 1 train*, as opposed to the A, which is/was an IND line).
similarly, when i’m back in the boston area, i’ll say “the T” to cover any part of the train/trolley system (but not MBTA busses), and name the line if there’s any ambiguity (which happens more often with the lettered branches of the Green Line than the color-named lines).
but the only local/regional train line abbreviations that i say as words are PATH and SEPTA.
.
* which will always be the 1/9 in my heart.
in new york city, but also more generally, i use “the train” to refer to anything that runs on tracks, whether the particular route i’m talking about is the subway, a commuter line, or an intercity service
Yes, I think that was my usage as well — “Wanna take a taxi?” “No, let’s take the train.” And I too took the IRT (the 1/9) to get home from midtown.
In the Lou Reed lines “And sister, she got married on the Island / And her husband takes the train,” the “train” is the LIRR, but in the separate Lou Reed lines (about 15 years later) “You got a black .38 and a gravity knife / You still have to ride the train,” the “train” is the subway. I don’t know that Lou was allergic to saying “the subway,” but it’s generally better to end a line with a stressed syllable.
Brett, above, today, opined that “That’s not some of Zimmer’s better work…,” referring to his 2010 NYT column,
but neglected to explain why, if unfamiliar with prior German use..
This is expected from common usage all over Europe. (“There is New York, and there is America.”) Except Paris, where only the City is officially the city and the rest of the completely built-up area is administratively separate.
Calling subways trains is completely unexpected, however.
As ulr said, all abbreviations are just called that, Abkürzung (a calque).
(Let’s see… ab-brevi-ā-tiō = Ab-kurz-¨-ung.)
Akronym is in Wiktionary with both senses and no comments on frequencies.
Seems perfectly plausible; the o is a hoary archaism as sometimes found in names, or a northernism, and the word had uo in MHG.
I’m intrigued. How does that work phonetically? Or is there some other equation going on?
…I actually hate those…
(In German they’re also associated with communism and, separately, with the 1950s; but not exclusively. I don’t think new ones have been coined in a few decades.)
J.W.B.: You still have to ride the train,” the “train” is the subway. I don’t know that Lou was allergic to saying “the subway,” but it’s generally better to end a line with a stressed syllable.
If it ends in a heavy syllable, it’s a train line. If it ends in a light syllable, it’s a subway line.
(Edit: I think that’s why they are called heavy and light rail, respectively.)
I think the start is just Saint-Teneu –> Saintt-Eneu. Wikipedia gives a whole assortment of names for her, including Tannoch, so maybe you just pick your preferred ending.
@Stephen Goranson: I think I was quite clear. Any specific meaning of the previous German etymon is irrelevant to what acronym means in English.
@David Marjanović: Indeed, I had no feeling for how Akronym might be used in German because I have no memory of every encountering, as Abkürzung is the usual word.
@Trond Engen: Light versus heavy rail, previously. I personally wouldn’t normally think of a subway line as light rail. Subways are their own separate thing, although a single line—such as the Green Line routes in Boston—can have sections are that subway and others that are light rail.
There was a local saint in upper Telemark called Tarald (formally < Þórvaldr), of whom little is known except that one of a pair of twin churches in Seljord was carrying his name and that his feast day was used for dating in some old deeds. One of the explanations is that it’s from an older sankt Harald with t from sankt. But that doesn’t really help, because no sankt Harald is known from anywhere, unless sankt Harald is in turn a local folk rebranding of sankt Hallvard. The latter is Norway’s probably second most important medieval saint after Olav, and he was also Olav’s nephew or something. The other twin church in Seljord was dedicated to sankt Olav. However, the feast days of saints Hallvard and Tarald don’t coincide in any easily explained way.
You can find a St. Harold in some possibly unreliable sources, although this may reflect a contentious view of the political personalities of 10th-century Denmark (ane environs) not officially endorsed by currently-living ecclesiastical authorities. https://sensusfidelium.com/the-lives-of-the-fathers-martyrs-and-other-principal-saints/november/st-harold-vi-king-of-denmark/ Apparently the later King Canute IV got all his saintly paperwork done in a more procedurally regular fashion.
FWIW that link appears to be reprinting a description from the noted 18th-century hagiographer Alban Butler, who is a big name in the history of the genre. He may have erred on the side of inclusion but I think in general faithfully if uncritically passed on the traditions available to him.
I thought that couldn’t be; I went to kindergarten with a Harald… but no, there isn’t any in the list of famous specimens in de.wikipedia; even Mstislav I was Great but not Saint.
However, *harja-wald- is the same as *wald-harja-, i.e. Walter, and there are at least 2 saints of that name. So maybe that counts.
…except they’re both optionally Waltger…
J.W.B.: You can find a St. Harold in some possibly unreliable sources
Indeed. I should have known better than playing quick and dirty with that fact! There are actually a couple of medieval kings of that name that had some ephemeral claim to sainthood, and Bluetooth is probably the most prominent of them. What I meant is that there’s no trace of a cult of sankt Harald in Norway.
Harald “Harold Gilchrist” IV of Norway but not Denmark is a saint-adjacent figure.
Ah, the days when a random Irishman could land in Norway, say he was an undocumented bastard of the previous king, and have that claim accepted because it was altogether plausible…
David M.: Harald “Harold Gilchrist” IV of Norway but not Denmark is a saint-adjacent figure.
Yes, Harald Gille is one of them. Katolsk.no’s extensive catalogue of saint biographies has this dismissive article, mentioning a shortlived claim of sainthood as part of his sons’ campaign for the throne after his death.
Though in fairness, if a cult of Harald Gille should have survived anywhere in Norway, the old Skienssysla may be the first place to look. One of Harald’s sons was the sickly Inge “Hunchback”, who was supported for kingship by a group of powerful men, the most prominent of which was Gregorius Dagsson of Skien. But if that were the case, we would expect the saint’s feastday to be the same as Harald Gille’s recorded death day.
Except Paris, where only the City is officially the city—by “city” I guess you mean “ville” rather than the smaller “Cité” at its centre. In France a ville has no status as an administrative unit, only a commune does. Most communes are named after the ville at their centre. The commune of Paris is coterminous with the département (75) of Paris, but larger than the ville, which excludes the two large Bois outside the Boulevard Périphérique (Boulogne in the 16th arrondissement and Vincennes in the 12th). A pair of roadsigns entering the Bois de Boulogne leaving the ville but still in the commune.
There’s also Tiago from Santiago.
And “the city” never, ever refers to the whole city — just Manhattan.
also just plain untrue. it’s geographically nested, conceptually. if i’m in crown heights and say “i’m going into the city this afternoon”, it means manhattan (and the reverse would never apply). if i’m in flushing, and someone who’s been mistaken for a transplant says “no, i’m from the city –” the next phrase could as easily be “i grew up right here” or “i was born at the staten island VA” as “my family’s lived in loisaida for three generations”. and if someone’s out on fire island, “when are you going back to the city?” can refer to anywhere from riverdale to little neck (but not yonkers or great neck).
if andrew keh has lived in new york city for a long time, which i’m inclined to doubt*, his social circles must be very specific (and likely limited to well-heeled transplants who live in manhattan, as one might expect for a Columbia grad at the NYStürmer).
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* a very cursory dig somewhat bears that out: he seems to have gone to Columbia and started at the Times in ’08, but apparently spent 2011-23 as a europe correspondent. it’s entirely possible for someone to be a new yorker after only a year or three in the city, but it’s just as possible for someone to live here for decades without ever becoming a new yorker – these kinds of self-assured mistakes are exactly the things that mark the difference.
no sankt Harald is known from anywhere
I thought that couldn’t be; I went to kindergarten with a Harald…
I don’t get the logic here… from what you mention about yourself here, you must have been born a long time after the times when people could be expected to have been named after a saint in Catholic German-speaking areas.
And I agree with ulr and DM, Akronym is not a widely used word in German.
David M.: I thought that couldn’t be; I went to kindergarten with a Harald…
I didn’t notice this. These “Viking” names were (mostly) revived with 19th C. national romanticism. Those that survived in vernacular tradition went through centuries of sound changes – like Tarald, but also e.g. Gullik, Tallak, Kjell m., Taran, Guri, Siri, Tove f.
@Brett. Acronym in OED has two senses, and the earliest quotation is in a translation, and the translators, Willa and Edwin Muir were Scottish not American, and the translation was from German.
Ah, that’s where Siri comes from!
(I learned of the artificial one long before I met a wetware version. I didn’t know it was an existing name.)
Well, yes*, but also no. There was not a lot of creativity, and also no fad for Norse names.
* I’m not named after a saint myself – the Welsh ones are unknown where I’m from.
One would imagine that David M. is directly or (more likely?) indirectly named after the David who figures extensively in the Old Testament. While that fellow is not conventionally referenced as St. David in English (and I guess not as Heilige David auf Deutsch), the Official Bureaucratic Position of the religious group historically dominant in Austria is that “Patriarchae et Prophetae et alii magni Veteris Testamenti homines fuerunt eruntque semper tamquam sancti in omnibus Ecclesiae traditionibus liturgicis veneratione culti.” (In the vulgar tongue, “Die Patriarchen, die Propheten und weitere große Gestalten des Alten Testamentes wurden und werden in allen liturgischen Traditionen stets als Heilige verehrt.”)