It’s a new soundtrack
I could dance to this beat forevermore
The lights are so bright
But they never blind me
Welcome to New York
It’s been waiting for you (Taylor Swift – ‘Welcome to New York’)
The word ‘nickname’, which I had assumed was a modern term, turns out to be from the Middle English phrase ‘an eke name’, meaning an additional name, and has been around since the 15th century (and possibly even the 14th century). Who knew? Every day – as I constantly say – is a school day!
I’ve never really had a nickname. One of my oldest friends calls me ‘Al’, but of course technically that’s less a nickname than a ‘hypocorism’ or diminution – and in honesty I’ve never really felt it fitted. Al Pacino, yes. Al Capone, absolutely. But Al Gyle? And any other nickname I’ve been given has been a fleeting thing – as at university – for a season only.
New York, by contrast, has nicknames aplenty. It is (and, after four nights now in my wonderfully centrally situated apartment here in the city, I can attest to this personally) “the city that never sleeps.” From relatively early in the 19th century it was known as “The Empire City” on account of its international trading status and influence and importance beyond its own city boundary. It is known by some as “Gotham”– after Gotham City, the creation of the Batman series of stories in DC Comics as far back as the 1930s, and of a late evening, with steam pumping through the manhole covers, and a mixture of shady-looking types and exhausted citizens standing or slumped in the shadows and doorways of cross-streets, you can see – almost a century later – where the inspiration came from and how it is that a city like this feels like it needs a superhero for safety!
But before the days even of Batman, in the 1920s, it became known as “The Big Apple.” It was John J. Fitz Gerald [sic], a sportswriter in the then popular but now defunct newspaper the New York Morning Telegraph, who invented the nickname that has stuck, inspired originally by the ‘big apples’ of prizes available in New York horseracing. The name caught the public imagination and was taken up, among others, by jazz singers in the 1930s – and in the 1970s the New York Tourist Board decided to use it in a campaign to attract visitors to the city from around the world. As a result, it is probably, these days, the New York nickname that has the widest resonance with the largest group of people who love the city and come here in mind-boggling numbers: last year, in 2024, the city attracted some 64.3M visitors, leveraging $51Bn in direct spending and with a total economic impact of $79Bn. This dwarfs London’s tourist business; in the same year, 2024, London had only 43M international visitors, representing £16.3Bn spending (though this represents half of the UK tourism total spend). No wonder, it occurs to me, that this is a city that never sleeps – it needs to operate 24/7 just to get all those people through it!
Nicknames are attached to people and places for a variety of reasons, good and bad (think of ‘Vlad the Impaler’), but I imagine that more often than not they are inspired by affection rather than fear or loathing. Many nicknames are actually ‘pet-names.’ And New York – on its showing so far – is a lovely, indeed loveable place, albeit slightly exhausting and noisy! And I think I’m going to love it here.
Stay tuned!
Or just Manhattan (if you can remember how to spell it).