Observations
- I knew before I came here that in New York you stand “on line,” not in it. But I didn’t know that when you go to a restaurant and you want to consume your food within the establishment and not elsewhere, your order is “to stay.” Not “for here.” “To stay.” So you’d say, I guess, “I’ll have that to stay.” That sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. I refuse to cave.
- A couple of foreign students at ITP remarked that they were surprised to see that so many Americans read. I’m assuming they came to this conclusion after seeing the fair amount of folks on the subway who block out the noise of boringness of their commute with novels and New Yorkers. I was surprised to see it, too, when I first arrived here. iPods I expected, but not In Cold Blood. I told them that I thought it was more of a New York thing than an American thing.
- Speaking of semi-high-brow lit, I saw a youngish Latina reading this fine work on the L Train: Behold a Pale Whore by Marcus Spears. The title is a play on a passage from the Book of Revelation. Fitting, since it’s an uplifting tale about a young girl named Mende who decides that God’s guidelines should be enhanced by this eleventh commandment…
“Thou shall not f@#k a black woman’s man or try to run away with all her money without catching an old-school project beat down!”
Thank you, Mende, for adding this to my list of daily dos and don’ts. I’m sure it will come in handy. Almost as handy as the sage advice given by 50 Cent in his series of gangsta novellas.
See, I’ve lived in New York my entire life, so I can’t fathom anything other than “on line” and “to stay.”
I mean, I think “on line” depends on context — you’d say “I’m standing in line” or “waiting in line,” but when you cut out the modifier, it’s “on line.”