From: Cousin Cedar
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 5:32 PM
To: prashkin@1400ml.com
Subject: Re: Tales of Two Cities

Hi Peter,

from a google search:

http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorn.htm
New York Minute
A New York minute is an instant. Or as Johnny Carson once said, it's the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn.

It appears to have originated in Texas around 1967. It is a reference to the frenzied and hectic pace of New Yorkers' lives. A New Yorker does in an instant what a Texan would take a minute to do.

The term has a mildly derogatory tinge to it; although New Yorkers are probably proud of the characteristic and would forgive your using it with a simple fuggedaboutit!

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http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19980924
Brendan Pimper writes:
I've heard the phrase "New York minute" a few places, but from the context I couldn't tell for sure whether it was longer or shorter than the minute we use locally. How long have you guys had your own unit of time, and is there a standard conversion?
If you have to wait for an answer, fuhgeddaboudit! It's already too long, baby.

A New York minute is a moment, an instant, no time at all.

The Texan Ken Weaver, in his delightful book Texas Crude (dig the R. Crumb illustrations) defined a "hot New York minute" as "Immediately. Equates to a nanosecond, or that infinitesimal blink of time in New York after the traffic light turns green and before the ol' boy behind you honks his horn." (As for the definition of a nanosecond, my colleague William Safire helpfully defined it as "one billionth of a second, a description of instantaneity almost as short as a New York minute.")

Some contextual examples that should make clear just how short a unit of time is being measured: "After White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles made it perfectly clear that he was tired of Washington, it took all of a New York minute for people to begin wondering about his replacement" (Time, 1997); "Though in general the mayor and city council welcomed the film people, it took a New York minute before the dashing CBS newcomers got crossways with Roslyn [a small town in Washington]" (The New Yorker, 1993).

The expression New York minute is first recorded in the late 1960s.