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!
===
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.