Quote:
Originally Posted by G1..
people love New York to but they don't call it York.no.
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This sparks an interesting topic.
The state of New York is hugely segmented...hugely diverse, both geographically and culturally.
People in New York tend to affiliate very strongly with a REGIONAL identity more than a STATE identity.
People don't love 'NEW YORK'. They love their specific little niche, or corner, or hidey-hole in New York.
NEW JERSEY (there...are you happy?) is much smaller and tighter knit, so it's kind of the opposite situation here. People in NJ primarily affiliate very strongly with a state identity, rather than a regional identity. Our residents, even as we have our own regional diversity and differences (North Jersey vs. South Jersey; city vs. suburbs vs. the shore vs. the boonies and the pine barrens), all still identify strongly with being from NEW JERSEY, whether they're from Cape May, Camden, Princeton, Hoboken, or Hackettstown.
A person from Manhattan, a person from Long Island, a person from Scarsdale, a person from Ithaca, a person from Saranac...'NEW YORK' means different things to all of them.
Even to the rest of the world, the appellation of 'NEW YORK' means something very specific.
The term 'NEW YORKER' mostly refers to someone from one of the 5 boroughs...not so much someone from Sleepy Hollow or Wappingers Falls.
YEAH, NO ONE SAYS 'YORK', but if you think about it, 'NEW YORK' is itself a nickname, really, just for 'NEW YORK CITY', which itself is a nickname just for 'MANHATTAN'. This is true for the vast majority.
When Sinatra crooned about his vagabond shoes longing to stray through 'NEW YORK', he wasn't talking about Long Island, or Staten Island, or even Brooklyn, and sure as hell not Suffern or Buffalo. (Same thing when Alicia Keys sings about 'NEW YORK', concrete jungle where dreams are made of.)
When a person says they're from 'NEW YORK', they are probably from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx. Because, for example, someone from Long Island will be more likely to tell you they live on Long Island, rather than just 'NEW YORK'. And even for the people who say they live in 'NEW YORK', they will oftentimes say they live Brooklyn, or Queens, or the Bronx, rather than just 'NEW YORK'. And the people from Manhattan will oftentimes say they live in TriBeCa, or the Upper East Side, or Washington Heights, or East Harlem, rather than just 'NEW YORK'. Someone from Saranac will be more likely to say they're from 'Upstate New York', rather than just 'NEW YORK', because, again, 'NEW YORK' has become synonymous with the handful of square miles surrounding Times Square.
And a lot of people still say 'Spanish Harlem', which is also a nickname. We can say that it derives from the fact that the people who live there mostly speak Spanish, but really, it derives from the time when people would loosely refer to anyone of Latino heritage as being 'SPANISH', and so they would refer to all the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans living in EAST HARLEM as 'Spanish'.
TL;DR:
(1) Different places develop nicknames that just become FOND TRADITIONS over time. It's not a malapropism or lapse in lingo that needs correction.
(2) Most people from the state of New York don't generally say 'NEW YORK' to describe where they're from...they will be more likely to tell you what region in New York Sate they're from, right down to the specific neighborhood, in the specific borough, in the specific city. So there was very little chance that the use of the term 'YORK' as a diminutive for 'NEW YORK' would ever gain popularity anyway.
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