Three New-York-Cityisms

SLIDING POND OR SLIDING PON is the common term in and around New York City for '(children's) slide.' Allen Walker Read (1973, p. 155) notes thatslidingpond was turned up for New York City by the DARE project, and Joseph L. Narun has recently noted it in these pages. Until the age of about twenty-five, I knew no name for this object but sliding pon or sliding pond; and, of about twenty New York City consultants I have queried, all but three reported one or both of the terms. According to George Jochnowitz of Staten Island Community College, his class of twenty Staten Island freshmen unanimously agreed that sliding pon was the only form used on the island. For other parts of the city, I could not discern any patterns. As for my three informants who did not use sliding pon(d), two answered slide (the general American English term) and one glitsh. All three rejected sliding pon(d) when prompted. The first two informants were from Washington Heights, Manhattan (childhood in' the 1920-30s), and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (1920s). The third came from a Yiddish-speaking family in the Bronx; the noun glitsh is a Yiddishism (cognate with English glide and Dutch glij) from the verb glitshn 'to slide.' The word is evidently a family term because Yiddish glitsh normally means 'slip, slippery area, slippery conditions, ice-skating rink,' and there was in fact no term for '(children's) slide' until the 1960s, when Mordkhe Schaechter, the dean of Yiddish-language planners, coined glitshlke (Gold, in press). For the suburbs and outlying areas, I have recorded sliding pon for Middlebush, New Jersey (1920s); Yonkers, New York (two informants from the 1920-30s), and Muncie, New York (1960s); sliding pond for New Rochelle, New York (1920s); Yonkers, New York (1920-30s); Roselle, New Jersey (1930s); Linden, New Jersey (1930s); and Newark, New Jersey (1930s); and slide for Dobbs Ferry, New York (1930-40s). Farther afield, one finds sliding board for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1930-70s); Lititz, Pennsylvania (1940s); West Orange, New Jersey (1960-70s); Baltimore, Maryland (1930-50s); sliding pot for Chicago, Illinois (1930s); slide for Boston, Massachusetts (1960s); Binghamton, New York (1960s); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1950s); Detroit, Michigan

Environmental Science · Geographic Information Systems Studies · Urbanization and City Planning

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