[78-L] I'm Dickens, He's Fenster

[DanKj]

  I have a better vision of what/where those places are, now that I've lived in Brooklyn and worked in or toured all 5 
boroughs. And there's a remote historical conection:  Turns out that one pair of great-grandfather & mother was living in 
The Bronx in 1910 - a Scotsman born in Pennsylvania with parents born in Canada, his wife born in Sweden, their 4 kids born 
in New York, and the mother-in-law born in Sweden in 1834.   What's odd is that the Census-taker asked 'what language 
spoken', although it isn't on the form. Odder is that he's got "Sweden / German" written in to Albertine & Bertha's info. 
Would someone born in Sweden speak German?  That's a mystery.

  Funny:  More than once, my friends in NYC mentioned that I use "more Yiddish words than people born down here".  I 
attribute that to reading /hearing /watching so much Marx Bros, Jolson, Cantor, Burns, Brooks, etc etc.  And there are 
Jewish people outside of NYC, I informed them.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Breneman" <david_breneman at yahoo.com>
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 1:25 AM
Subject: Re: [78-L] I'm Dickens, He's Fenster


> --- On Fri, 2/18/11, Mark Bardenwerper <citrogsa at charter.net> wrote:
>
>> Later, Astin's monster father colleague, Fred Gwyn was in
>> Car 54, where are you?
>>
>> Ooh-ooh-ooh!
>
> There's a holdup in The Bronx
> Brooklyn's broken out in fights
> There's a traffic jam in Harlem
> That's backed up to Jackson Heights...
>
> I had no idea, as a kid, what and where any of those
> places were, but "back in the day" everyone in the US
> was expected to know what East Coast place names
> referred to.  You just took it as a cultural tide
> that washed over you and assumed that there was some
> significance to those words;