Here's Why You Should Blame NYC
I abbreviate everything
When my kids were teens, they’d roll their eyes when my response to them calling for me was, “Be there in a min.”
The double eye roll came when my son had a friend named MJ and I called him M.
Don’t blame me. Blame NYC. That’s where I learned the art of abbreviation. I was a student at NYU. It was 1984ish and I not only studied theatre arts but also New Yorkers, eager to join the hip clique of that metropolis.
I excitedly hailed a cab for the first time. Swinging my arm in the air made me a real New Yorker. I matured two years with that one arm flip. And like magic, a yellow car pulled in front of me to take me to my destination.
One vehemently hot, humid day, a gal with a narrow, lanky build stepped in front of me.
“Share?” She said.
“The cab?”
“No, my boyfriend,” she said sardonically and was already climbing into the sedan. I followed like a puppy. I knew Lanky would be my city mentor for the duration of my ride.
She waited for me to place my destination order. It wasn’t more than a moment, an inhalation and that was too long for her, so she went first.
“69 and CPW.”
I registered her code, “Oh, 69 is 69th and CPW is Central Park West.”
The driver spoke her language and gassed it. I fell back into the seat.
Lanky gal gave me the your-turn look.
“Oh, uh, Avenue of the Americas and 49th, I mean, 49.”
The driver and Lanky chuckled.
“New here?” she said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“No one says, ‘Avenue of the Americas.’ It’s 6. If you’re not going to 6th Street, it’s understood that it’s 6th Avenue.”
“Got it.”
Lanky had great information. I wanted us to be friends, yet I was intimidated.
“Student?” she said, not using any pronouns or verbs.
“NYU,” I replied following her grammatical lead.
She looked me over, no comment.
Silence was the truest form of abbreviation.
I couldn’t decipher Lanky’s age. I determined 30 because her chin and cheeks were smooth. Her smile lines, however, told a different duration. Also, I imagined those lines were not from smiling. Scowling maybe. I could see her grimacing a thousand times on the subway platform because her train was late, or it was too crowded or a dude shoved his exposed dick against her. (The latter had already happened to me.) One deep set crease between her brows needed ironing. And it wasn’t the furrowing kind of crease. I guessed that the contour was from growing up here. The upper west side in the 1970s when crime was common. Oh, if her troughs could talk…
Abbreviations have a long history. https://www.britannica.com/topic/abbreviation
Here’s my version; A nice caveman named Gabe was smitten with a local cavegirl and wanted to impress her by sharing his BBQed wildebeest with her. While other wooing cavemen left silly drawings on a wall, caveman Gabe was determined to chisel the words, Yum, into a stone. Frustrated with the time it took, Gabe instead, wrote Y. Instantly, cavegirl Marge knew that Gabe was the one. Two days later they married in a private ceremony overlooking the Rift Valley. “Y” was the first abbreviation in human history. Today, the “Y” doesn’t mean, Yes, but is like a Thumbs Up emoji.
“Regular” Did Not Mean Caffeinated
A few weeks before riding with Lanky, I started learning the city lingo. I remember the first time I was shooed thru the deli line. That’s where we got our coffee to go--the deli. Starbucks was just a charming coffee house near Pikes Market in Seattle. No one was the wiser.
I was inexperienced.
I arrived in front of a chubby deli man with sausage fingers. He was already tapping his pen as I blurted, “Coffee with cream.”
“You mean ‘reguhluh’?” (In English, “regular.”)
“Yes regular coffee.”
A Wall Street type dude behind me translated, “’Regular’ means with cream.”
“I thought ‘regular’ meant caffeinated.”
Wall St. guy grimaced and placed his order, “Light and sweet.” He winked at me and said, “Cream and sugar.”
It was then that I understood coffee code. And that everything was caffeinated in NY. I sighed knowing I had a long way to go. The language of NYC was going to be harder than High School French.
And abridged. New Yorkers hollered or spoke in truncations.
My Sweaty Legs
I was about to ask Lanky for her phone number. She would be a terrific resource for food, cheap Broadway seats, maybe even a rent-controlled apartment since my summer sublet was almost over and I had nowhere to live.
I unstuck my shorts from the vinyl cab seat and looked through my backpack for a pen.
The cab driver stopped short and leaned on his horn. He poked his head out the window and yelled at the j-walker.
Lanky rolled down her window and echoed the driver.
(Expletives here.)
Lanky pulled her head back in and continued the cursing, commiserating with the driver.
“Did you see that f—king guy?
“He come from nowhere,” the driver said in broken English.
Lanky waited for me to join the fray.
“Damn j-walker,” I said. “I once got a j-walking ticket.”
“He wasn’t a fucking j-walker,” Lanky said with gusto.
“We had green light,” overlapped the driver.
Lanky removed a tiny vial from her fabric purse and carefully tapped a white powder into the underside of her pinky fingernail. She held that nail up to my face. I knew it was cocaine, I wasn’t THAT innocent. She lifted her pinky higher reminding me of my Jewish grandmother but instead of saying, “Eat,” she said, “Sniff.” I really wasn’t in the mood for cocaine; I just ate a bagel.
“Looks good but I have an audition—that’s where I’m going.” I lied and wished I really had an audition.
Lanky shrugged and with a swift lurch of her finger, up went the powder into her left nostril.
I dropped the pen back into the interior pocket of my backpack, deciding against a friendship. Screaming at strangers and drugs was not how I wanted to spend my college years.
“Where to drop?” said the driver.
“What?” I didn’t quite understand.
“Which corner is convenient for you, princess?” said Lanky.
“Oh, uh, far right.”
The driver cut across four lanes and stopped short at 49th and 6th, the far corner.
I gave Lanky more than enough for my portion of the ride and stepped out of the car, thanking them both.
I watched them pull away into traffic and realized she called me, Princess. I guess one person’s Princess is another person’s struggling student.
The Silent Treatment
Still, there’s something about my time in NY I treasure. If asked where I grew up I would say, “I lived in Los Angeles for the first twenty years of my life, but I grew up in New York.”
I’ll keep my abbreviations thankyouverymuch. Or rather, TYVM.
It’s 2023 and I can’t keep up with my kids’ abbreviations—FUBO, FWIW, IMHO? And the more obscure, “sketch,” bougie,” “legit…” I mean WTF?
Often, I get the silent abbreviations from them. My son NEVER texts me back and my daughter doesn’t leave a message on my phone. Another type of abbreviation. It’s my job to look at my “recents” and know that she called. Gone are the days of leaving a message.
“Did you know there’s an abbreviation for abbreviation?” I said not too long ago.
“WC” said my daughter.
“Water closet?”
“No, who cares?” said my son translating.
“And what the hell is a ‘water closet?’”
“It’s a British bathroom.”
My kids are in their twenties now. Instead of an eye roll they listen and engage. They are spectacular young adults.
I did get the last word in, “Can I just point out that WC has more syllables than “who cares?”
Humans started with grunts, we advanced into speaking the most beautiful languages, writing poetry and Opera, then, back to abbreviations, now emojis, soon we will “evolve” back to grunts.
1. Do you blame NYC?
2. If you speak in abbreviations, does anyone understand you? If you don’t, does anyone understand you?
3. Should Caveman Bob have his own Wikipedia?
Thank you for reminding me of "coffee regular"... I SO miss those blue cups :) xo
I miss NYC, but not so much the abbreviations as the lingo. I learned what a regular coffee was before I was old enough to drink it. I still stand on line at the post office, and sarcasm is my primary language. Thanks for taking me home.