there is only ever one city

[edenfalling]

This amuses me: Most of America realizes that New York really is "The City"

Because of course NYC is the city. I am glad to see that the majority of Americans recognize this truth. :-)

(Taken from Business Insider's slideshow of 22 maps that show how Americans speak English totally differently from each other. Images made by Joshua Katz, based on answers to the linguistic survey of Bert Vaux and Scott Golder.)

Comments

[marycontrary]

Silly Easterners. Where I live, the City is San Francisco. It's a neat graph, though -- my accent isn't any one region, but it is completely covered by the two regions I've spent most of my life in and the food terms from the area where my parents grew up. How satisfactory to see a system working.

[edenfalling]

Aren't they awesome graphs? I grew up in New Jersey, I live in west-central New York, and my parents were from south-central Minnesota. This neatly explains all my responses to the questions those graphs address -- even the way that I don't use ANY of the four given pronunciations for 'pecan' but instead say pee-CAN, which is apparently an idiosyncratic combination of pee-KAHN (Minnesota) and PEE-can (NJ).

Many people agree with you that some non-NYC place should be accorded the distinction of being THE city, and there is a noticeable increase in the intensity of that feeling around San Francisco. I am nonetheless amused by the faint washes of red over places two-thirds of the country away from New York, not to mention the purplish tint of southern California. *grin*

[lady_songsmith]

Well, of course it is! What other city could be??

[edenfalling]

Exactly. :-)

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I am hoping this is not serious because living a zillion miles from New York, if someone told me they were goi g o the city, NYC would not be my first consideration of where they are talking about ( not that I have any other city in kind either but...)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, you can see on the map that people around (for example) Chicago and Boston don't use "the city" to mean New York -- and while there were no other specific options provided, I am told that San Francisco is also "the city" to people in its vicinity. The funny thing is the faint wash of red over parts of the map that are, as you say, a zillion miles from New York. Which is just a visual representation of the way New York sort of dominates the culture of our country. It is the Platonic ideal of a city to a lot of Americans, I guess. :-)