Slang words only New Yorkers will understand
New York City’s slang is the product of centuries of immigration compressed into a single, impatient city. Almost entirely impenetrable to outsiders.
If you have to ask what any of these mean, you are probably from New Jersey.
Bodega
Mental Floss notes that New Yorkers call convenience stores bodegas, but unless they have a 7-Eleven emblazoned over the entrance, they often refer to them as bodegas, the Spanish word for “cellar.” The term stems from the independently-owned Puerto Rican quick-shop storefronts, which began opening up as early waves of immigrants arrived in NYC in the early 20th century. The bodega is not just a store. It is a social institution, a meeting point, a neighborhood anchor and the source of the bacon egg and cheese that New Yorkers abroad miss more than anything else about home.
Brick
According to Parade, brick means cold so intense it feels like walking into a wall. One syllable.
Mad
In most of the country outside New York, “mad” means angry. In New York, this adjective is a New Yorker’s intensifying adverb of choice. Something that is “mad good” is extremely good. Someone who is “mad late” is very late. The usage strips the word of its emotional content entirely and turns it into a pure intensifier. Out-of-towners deploying “mad” for the first time almost always apply it incorrectly, which is immediately identifiable to anyone from the city.
The City
For local New Yorkers, the island of Manhattan is called “The City.” This is not a geographic description so much as a statement of hierarchy. New York has five boroughs, but when someone from Queens or Brooklyn says they are going to the city, everyone knows exactly where they mean. It implies a kind of centripetal gravity that Manhattan exerts on the rest of the metropolitan area, acknowledged casually and without irony by the people who spend the most time resenting it.
Fuhgeddaboudit
As Mental Floss notes, former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 2016, the term likely made its debut on the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, which was set in Brooklyn. It functions as a multipurpose dismissal, an expression of disbelief and occasionally an enthusiastic endorsement, depending entirely on tone. Johnny Depp explained its range of meanings in Donnie Brasco. The borough of Brooklyn installed road signs bearing the phrase in 2016. It is simultaneously a cliché, a genuine linguistic artifact and the single most accurate symbol of a very specific kind of New York personality.
Bridge and tunnel
Coming into Manhattan from New Jersey means a bridge or a tunnel. New Yorkers call those people bridge and tunnel. The outer boroughs do not entirely escape it.
The bottom line
Four centuries of immigration compressed into five boroughs produced a way of talking that sounds like nowhere else on Earth. Which is exactly how New Yorkers prefer it.
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