Trip of the Tongue Read Free

poetic “place of many hills” to the entirely dissimilar “good place to collect bow wood.”
    The second-most-common translation of Manhattan may have less linguistic support, but it is undoubtedly my sentimental favorite. In the course of his study of the customs of the Lenape, a Moravian missionary named John Heckewelder was told an interesting story about the origin of Manhattan , which Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace relate in a footnote of Gotham , their great first volume of New York City history:
    The Lenape gave a Pennsylvania missionary their version of what happened when the first white men landed on Manhattan: they sighted a “large canoe or house” moving across the water and decided that it belonged to the Supreme Being, “the great Manitto,” who then appeared before them dressed entirely in red. After a preliminary exchange of courtesies, he offered them a toast and they all got happily drunk—whence the site came to be known as Mannahattanink, “the island or place of general intoxication.”
    When Heckewelder passed this information along, he remarked, “Facts are all I aim at, and, from my knowledge of the Indians, I do not believe every one’s story. The enclosed account is, I believe, as authentic as any thing of the kind can be obtained.” I would love to be able to take his word for it.
    The other Munsee word we all know a version of came to English less directly. In 1886 a coffee broker named James Potter was invited to an estate of the Prince of Wales. When Potter inquired about appropriate attire, he was directed to His Royal Highness’s Savile Row tailor, where he was fitted with a tailless dinner jacket. That fall Potter wore this same jacket to a ball at his club back in the United States. The jacket was widely remarked upon, and the style was later named for Tuxedo Park, the town where it had first been seen. The word tuxedo itself, meanwhile, most probably came from the Munsee word p’tuck-sepo , or “crooked river.”
    Then there are the European languages of New York. The first European we know of to visit New York City stayed just long enough to merit having his name, centuries later, assigned to a bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island. * It wasn’t until Henry Hudson sailed the Halve Maen into Lower New York Bay in 1609 that a new language gained a foothold in the area.
    By the time the British took over New Amsterdam and the rest of the colony in 1664, Dutch was a language of considerable influence in the area. In fact, Dutch remained the official school language in New York until nearly the nineteenth century, and as of 1756 there was still a sizable enough Dutch-speaking population to cause bureaucratic complications. William Smith, a local historian, observed at the time that “English is the most prevailing Language amongst us, but not a little corrupted by the Dutch Dialect, which is still so much used in some Counties, that the Sheriffs find it difficult to obtain Persons sufficiently acquainted with the English Tongue, to serve as Jurors in the Courts of Law.”
    Though many of the words Dutch loaned to English have fallen out of use, plenty remain to bear witness to the important—if brief—role the Dutch played in early American history. Some of these words are New York City–specific. Stoop , for instance, is an anglicization of stoep , “a small porch with seats or benches.” The Dutch also contributed place names such as Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, as well as topographical terms such as kill (creek) and hook (angle). Bowery —which in modern New York is for reasons I have been unable to uncover always preceded with a definite article—originated from a Dutch word for “farm.” Dutch words used outside the five boroughs include cole slaw , waffle , caboose , snoop , and spook . Some of these words, such as cookie (from koekje , “little cake”),