How to speak like a New Yorker IV

If you've ever visited New York City, chances are you've taken a trip in a yellow cab (read my post about NYC cabs here). But a common mistake visitors make is not knowing how to tell the cab driver where you want to go. First, some cab drivers may seem uncouth, but it's no reason to be rude or impatient with them. 90% of all the cabs I've ever been in were piloted by cabbies who were skillful, knowledgeable, grateful when tipped, and polite. And the other 10%? Well, I can be sympathetic to the fact that driving a cab in New York will test anyone's patience.

Second, it's important to give the address of your destination to your cab driver in a way that helps him or her (there are over 400 women cab drivers in NYC). For example, don't tell your driver that you want to go to "532 Broadway." Instead, it's far more helpful to know the "cross-street" (i.e. the street that intersects your destination). So if you get in a cab and say, "corner of Broadway and Spring," you're more likely to get there quicker.*

Third, once you're almost at your destination, you may instruct the cabbie where exactly to pull over. Virtually all the streets in Manhattan are one-way streets, so if you're stopping at an intersection, let the cabbie know whether you'd like to stop at the "near-corner on the left" or the "far-corner on the right" or whatever applies.

* True story: Sarah and I once got in a cab because we were too tired to take the subway back to our apartment. We told the cabbie the cross-streets, but he told us that he'd only been on the job for two weeks and didn't know where exactly Mott Street intersected with Houston Street. It was the first time we ever had to give a Manhattan geography lesson to a cab driver.

How to speak like a New Yorker III

If you've ever spent a significant amount of time enjoying New York City nightlife, you've probably heard the term "B&T" or "bridge and tunnel." This term I actually don't recommend using, only because I think it's derogatory and exclusionary in its most popular sense; B&T refers to people who aren't Manhattan residents but come into the city (via the bridges or tunnels) for dinner, drinks, or entertainment. The Urban Dictionary says it succinctly. Wikipedia has a more comprehensive description. My question is: are you still B&T if you came in by the Staten Island ferry?

How to speak like a New Yorker I

Today I begin an absolutely irregular series of posts entitled "How to speak like a New Yorker." These posts will have nothing to do with the stereotypical Noo Yawk accent, i.e. the New York dialect you might associate with Robert De Niro or, um, Fran Drescher. In fact, the majority of NYC's population does not have that accent, and many New York residents have speech patterns that correspond to English speakers from other continents (and by "In fact" I mean "I'm just guessing").

The truth is that tourists to the Big Apple give themselves away immediately by mispronouncing place names, or being unfamiliar with the basics of the subway system, or not knowing the difference between a street and an avenue. I'm not an expert in all things New York, by any means, but I have lived here long enough to be mildly annoyed when someone mispronounces the street I live on. This series is an attempt to help the uninitiated visitor avoid similar bloopers.

First in the series: Houston Street. Commonly mispronounced as "HYOO-stin," after the largest city in Texas, it is actually pronounced "HOW-stin." I hear this error all the time because I live about 50 yards from Houston Street, which happens to be a fairly long and well-known thoroughfare in Manhattan. You can read more information about it here.