Origin of New York City’s Nickname “The Big Apple,” by Gerald Leonard Cohen and Barry Popik (review)

Before there were blogs, Jerry Cohen was a blogger, with his self-published journal of modest circulation and great influence, Comments on Etymology. Over the years this journal has become the prime locus for research on American slang. Barry Popik, a frequent contributor to Comments on Etymology since 1990, is an actual blogger, also focusing on the history of American slang (http://www.barrypopik.com).

Both authors follow in the footsteps of Allen Walker Read, a googler before there was Google, who read copiously in early American publications to definitively determine, among other things, the obscured origin of OK, America’s greatest word. Like Read, Cohen and Popik delve into early publications in search of the true origins of words like jazz (California baseball before it was New Orleans music). And nowadays they make full use of the growing number of online databases.

When Cohen has gathered sufficient evidence, he lays it out for all to see, first in Comments on Etymology and then, if the material warrants, in a book. Such is this book, devoted entirely to New York City’s nickname “the Big Apple.” It’s the second edition, revised and expanded from the first edition of 1991. In the Acknowledgments, Cohen credits Popik with most of the additions and lists him as co-author, although Cohen narrates the story in the first person.

The Big Apple, the authors convincingly conclude, as a nickname for New York City, was a horse-racing term that originated in New Orleans and was first used in New York itself in 1921 by a “turf reporter” for the Morning Telegraph, John J. Fitz Gerald.

The book lays out the evidence in painstaking detail. The first chapter is nothing but a chronological listing of “Big Apple” quotes relevant to that designation for New York City—but what a chronological listing! Twenty-seven pages, about 140 quotes in all, from 1909 to 1968. Chapter 2 has a dozen pages of lengthy quotations dealing with a linguistically (but not conceptually) related matter, the Big Apple Dance, established in South Carolina in 1937. For a time some thought it was the source of New York City’s nickname, but the New York nickname had been in use for a decade or more before the dance came along.

Chapter 3 contains ten pages of quotations from mistaken or misleading articles about the origin of the city’s nickname. They explain the need for this book: For a long time other explanations for the origin of the Big Apple flourished, and some still are extant—for once launched into the infosphere, a mistake will live forever.

What else? Well, Chapter 4 is a digression, again with copious quotes, on the theme “Apples regarded as very special.” Chapter 5 is about John J. Fitz Gerald, the turf reporter who introduced the Big Apple to New York City. Chapter 6 tells about Charles Gillett, the man who in 1971 as president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau revived the Big Apple as a slogan for the city. These chapters, like all the others, consist primarily of citations, with commentary by the editors.

Chapter 7 is a long one, some twenty-eight pages presenting and refuting eight incorrect etymologies, an important and sometimes difficult aspect of establishing the correct one. By the time we get to Chapter 8, Summary and General Observations, the groundwork has been so thoroughly prepared that Cohen can declare, “Everything here now looks very straightforward, if not downright simple,” to which he adds, “and yet it was not always so.” Cohen and Popik, having made the crooked straight and the rough places plain, can justifiably be certain about it. And concise. Their summary of the four stages of development of the Big Apple takes up just half a page, followed by two...