More New Yorkers of late are calling the Bronx just “Bronx,” and some people think it’s a mistake.
But the very name “the Bronx” has always been a mistake itself. And language is chock-full of mistakes we don’t even know we’re making.
The Bronx is named after a European landowner named Jonas Bronck. As common memory of Bronck faded, people started hearing “Bronck’s River” as just Broncks, not referring to a person whom the river was named after. As such, it felt right to say “the Broncks River.” Then this was shortened to “the Broncks — now spelled “the Bronx.”
Great, but technically this is a flub. It’s as if the area had been named after someone named York and we today called it “the Yorks” or even “the Yorx.”
Language is like this, and another example is people saying “West Village” instead of “the West Village.” This gets under people’s skin, too, but again, it’s how language changes.
There was a time when Greenwich Village truly was a village, one of many districts in Manhattan hewed out of the marshland that it originally was. But today, the “village” in Greenwich Village refers to no actual village. We pronounce the word “village” perceiving no meaning connected to the actual place. Sixth Avenue has no more of the village or hamlet about it than my childhood neighborhood in Philadelphia, Mount Airy, evokes a sense of altitude sickness or oxygen deprivation.
Rather, “village” is a vibe, an atmosphere, a style (like my beloved Mount Airy!). It was natural that the West Village would lose its “the” because we perceive not that there is a village that we are in the western half of, but that we are in the western part of Village, above which is Chelsea and below which is Soho.
The question would be why people started calling it “West Village” once the place was no longer anything like a village. “West Village” isn’t new. When I lived in New York for a spell in the 1980s, I clearly recall calling it “West Village” more often than not. Speaker A: “Where is Jason?” Speaker B: “Somewhere in West Village.” I also would never have said “the East Village” at all. Back then, “East Village” was a unique and especially vibrant cultural scene, which one would hardly refer to as “the” eastern segment of some village.
Consistency is an issue on this as well. If “West Village” is such a barbarism, then why are we so comfortable calling the Queens neighborhood “Middle Village”? No one clears his throat and chirps, “Why, we’re moving to the Middle Village!” When people occasionally call it that, it sounds off. West Village!
As someone who keeps food separate on his plate and likes things tidy, I get that people want language to make sense. But it just doesn’t. You have to allow the car to get dings.
Dutch place names are a mess in many ways. A word for “river” in Dutch is “kill.” A major river in Philadelphia is the Schuylkill River. That name technically means “the hidden river river.” And let’s not even get into how “Schuylkill” is pronounced. It marks a native Philadelphian that one knows that it is pronounced “SKOO-kul,” which is not even how it would be pronounced in Dutch.
Joan of Arc’s name is a mistranslation. Her surname was probably “Darc,” which somewhere along the line was interpreted as being “d’Arc” with an apostrophe, such that it would mean “of Arc.” But that last name was spelled in various ways in documents, almost never with an apostrophe. And Joan was not born in a town called Arc, nor was her father, nor is anyone quite sure just which geographical “Arc” is at issue. Joan of Arc was really, in terms of how we would spell it in English, Joan Dark. Who among us wants us to switch to that?
The word “female” is a mistake. English got it from the Old French as “femelle.” That seemed to some as if it was related to “male,” and hence the goofy “fe-male.” The word would otherwise have come out as something like “FEH-mul.”
We say “dee” for the letter D, “djee” for the letter G, but then for H, “aitch.” Why no H sound at the beginning, and why the “ch” at the end? It was based on a mistake.
In Latin, H was “ha,” and K as “ka” came after it. People reciting the alphabet would say “ha, ka, el ….” But Latin didn’t really need the K, because C did its job. (Caesar was pronounced “KIGH-sar.”) So people started thinking of “ha, ka” as referring just to H and saying “haka.” Heavy usage transforms pronunciation. “Haka” dropped the “H” at the start like Eliza Doolittle was taught out of in her “Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire” exercise — “aka.” Then the K changed to a “ch” — “ahcha” — and the A at the end dropped off — “ahch.” Then the “ah” changed to “ay” and hence “aitch”! We should really be calling H something like “hay.” But hey, we don’t — and the world keeps spinning.
Bronx, West Village — we just need to sit back and let it happen. So much of what we say now either started as a flub, or transformed along with changes in perception. As long as language is making us aware of what others mean, it’s doing its job. Not that it always does — communication can be hard and we need to work on doing it better, especially these days. On our agenda, people saying “Bronx” ought to be distinctly low.
