The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech

The American urban scene, and in particular New York's, has given us a rich cultural legacy of slang words and phrases, a bonanza of popular speech. Hot dog. rush hour, butter-and-egg man. gold digger, shyster, buttinsky, smartaleck, sidewalk superintendent, yellow journalism, breadline. straphanger, tar beach, the Tenderloin, the Great White Way, to do a Brodie-these are just a few of the hundreds of popular words and phrases that were coined or took on new meaning in the streets of New York.

In The City in Slang, Irving Lewis Allen traces the flowering of popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis from the early nineteenth century down to the present. This unique account of the cultural and social history of America's greatest city provides in effect a lexicon of popular speech about city life. With many stories Allen shows how this vocabulary arose from city streets, often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley.