Except for the few weeks I’ve spent visiting NYC, I have never lived closer than 1500 miles to New York, and “I live in Bronx” sounds wrong to me. I wouldn’t quibble about “University of New York” if I heard it, but if I saw it in something I was editing, I would check to see if that’s actually how it went.
(I went to the University of Oklahoma, or “OU” as it was popularly known. In that case, either way works. I’m assuming that “University of New York” is also a legit term, but that nobody uses it.)
I’ve wondered about that “the Bronx” thing. I’m guessing it’s a residue from being settled originally by people who hailed from places like “The Hague” and “The Netherlands.”
Nope, just saying that I am a person who doesn’t live there who thinks it would be strange to just say ‘‘Bronx’’ And not ‘‘The Bronx.’’ I think that’s what the OP was asking. I think to the average person, living anywhere in the U.S., just saying ‘‘Bronx’’ would sound funny.
I grew up in Connecticut and went to college in Troy, NY. So I am familiar with what was at the time formally the State University of New York at Albany but we informally called SUNY-A, but is now called the University at Albany, which seems more pretentious although it’s more succinct.
To the best of my knowledge, New York City is the largest example of the “postal address is not necessarily city/town of residence” phenomenon. I.e, I live in a small town in Franklin County, NC, but my mailing address and phone exchange are Zebulon, five mile away and in a different county.
In New York, “New York, NY 100xx” denominates an address in New York County, i.e., Manhattan. “Bronx, NY” signifies the Bronx. I think all of Brooklyn is Brooklyn, NY, but there may be some exceptions. Queens borough on the other hand is a whole slew of former towns and villages, including Flushing, Jamaica, etc., none of them with any legal validity any more but all of them still the obligatory postal address. I’m not sure about Staten Island, but I think there are three named post office locations there. (Needless to say, most if not all of these names have a multiplicity o post offices affiliated with them – I’m just looking at the “city” names appropriate within the City of New York.
And here we generally just say the number as, “Take two-ninety four (294) to eighty-eight (88),” although you can certainly say “i-294” and “i-88,” or, even better, “Take the Tri-State to the East-West (or Reagan) Tollway.” The latter is how we generally suss non-natives out.
To clarify, AFAIK there is no University of New York and I was trying to say the expression “University of New York” is as bad to me as “I live in Bronx.” As if there just shouldn’t be a University of New York. And I was asking how it sounds to you.
I’m wondering if there is anyone from really far away from NY like New Zealand and who hasn’t heard of the Bronx, who could comment on the OP.
I lived in NYC for 25 years, including a couple of years in Brooklyn Heights (on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge). I always used “Brooklyn Hts.” in my address, though as long as the ZIP code were correct, “Brooklyn” would work too.
A personal favorite of mine is that people tend to live in Staten Island but on Long Island. The former aren’t mole-men, they simply live within the bounds of the borough of Staten Island.
Y’all are killing me. I’ve never been to New York City. I came as close as the George Washington Bridge, but I was the navigator and except for one sweet glimpse of the House that Ruth Built, I had to keep my eyes on the road.
Yesterday, I went to see Sex and the City. Sometimes it’s really hard to believe that I’ve never been there. After this thread, I’m really In a New York State of Mind…
Don’t let them change the Chelsea! And send me an egg cream! I’ve never had one!
“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down…” Any alteration would ruin the meter.
Agreed, in general, but what if I ask, “Where are you from?” and the respondent says, “Bronx.”
Sounds totally natural, no? Odd the way that works – it’s exactly the sentence the OP uses as an example, “I live in Bronx.” But it sounds fine. Technically, just “Bronx” is not a sentence since it’s missing a verb – and a subject. They’re implied though. You can certainly write it, too. In dialogue it might be the only way to write it to sound natural, in informal exchanges between teenagers for example (or anyone for that matter). “The Bronx” might sound overly formal.
It’s always the Bronx. Never heard it any other way.
The highway/interstate thing is interesting. I used to live in San Luis Obispo, whose residents consider themselves Central Coasters but the rest of the state considers it SoCal. So we had “the 1” and “the 101” nearby.
If you were to refer to the highways around Austin as “the 35” or “the 183” or “the 290,” I’m certain a burly Texan would appear, punch you in the face, and toss you across the state line with your carton of soy milk and recyclable container of alfalfa sprouts.
“The University of New York” sounds made up. Maybe it’s because I work in higher education and I’m familiar with the SUNY nomenclature. It sounds like a movie invention: “Hey, dude, let’s go upstate this weekend on a road trip… my girlfriend goes to the University of New York!”
… proposed his Bronx-supremacy-over-Brooklyn-literature thesis to me
… inspired by Bronx native Don DeLillo’s meditations on Bronxness in Underworld
… he had been developing a thesis on the way Bronx-born literati had begun to surpass the long reign of Brooklyn natives in American letters
… comparative charts which traced Bronx and Brooklyn writers to their respective high schools
… my own longstanding Yankee-hater’s antipathy to Bronxness
… which also include Bronx-bred literary figures Irving Howe and Harold Bloom
There is less of a unified Bronx sensibility, the defining Bronx neighborhoods (like the East Tremont Jewish community) “have been destroyed by the Cross-Bronx Expressway”
… speaks of a Yankee factor in Bronx consciousness
… an entire future generation of Bronx literary talent
In the case of Ukraine, the usage changed in their own language on gaining independence, and the trend towards dropping the ‘the’ in English simply follows on from that. (BTW, I never was aware that there was anybody ‘running our language’ )
In none of those is ‘Bronx’ a noun.
Regarding ‘University of New York’, it doesn’t sound at all wrong to British ears, no doubt because our universities named after localities can generally be interchanged freely - ‘University of Oxford’ and ‘Oxford University’ mean the same thing, even if only one of them is technically the true name of the institution.
As I said – In general, yes. But in any of the examples in red above just the opposite is true. Substituting “the Bronx” in any one of them would sound awkward, overly formal, like fingernails on a chalkboard, or all of the above.
The article I quoted was divided equally, 15 “the Bronx” and 15 “Bronx” (I didn’t include all possible examples in my previous post). One of them could have gone either way, “… the Bronx resident Edgar Allan Poe …” might just as well be “Bronx resident Edgar Allan Poe.”
You hear it the other way all the time. Half the time at least.
So what? In the example the OP gives, and I am responding to, it is not a noun. By the way, Gorilla Man, you are using it as a noun. I could add your usage to my examples. Sounds perfectly fine. It just rolled off your pen, so to speak, because it’s natural.
And, I would add, no one ever specified we were talking about nouns only. The OP’s usage is object of preposition. Many of mine are adjectival.
