Maybe you could ask “Where are you from?” and get an answer of “Bronx” and it might sound natural … it very much depends on the context. Answering with “The Bronx” would always sound fine, it would never, ever sound overly formal.
You might be more likely to get “Bronx” as a negative response, if you ask “You’re from Queens, right?” and the answer is “BRONX” where the omission of the “the” and the emphasis on Bronx would be used to convey the abject horror of being mistakingly identified as being from Queens. Again, you could also answer this with “the Bronx” and sound perfectly natural.
Huh? ‘If I heard someone say “I live in Bronx,” it would be like fingernails on the blackboard, and all that. How does it sound to a non-New Yorker? Or how does “I live in the Bronx” sound to you?’ They certainly look like nouns to me.
My usage was as a quotation from your examples! See those little dashes hanging either side of the word? They mean something :rolleyes:
I don’t know what “those little dashes hanging either side of the word” are called either. I do use them – to set off a word or phrase – but I’m never sure I’m using them correctly. I don’t think they’re a substitute for quotation marks though. In fact, when I do use them I always make sure the usage can’t in any way be mistaken for quotation marks. I mistook your usage for ‘setting off’ the word Bronx. I didn’t realize you were quoting.
I’ll rephrase your sentence, “In none of those is ‘Bronx’ a noun,” without changing its meaning, like this: “Bronx is not a noun in any of those” [Mark Ryle’s examples]. You can see you are using it as noun. Does it sound wrong? Fingernails on a chalkboard implies gratingness. There’s no gratingness in it. And it is used as a noun.
As they’re called single quotation marks, I think they can be
It looks wrong to me without quotation marks. But anyhow, I’m not using it as a noun, unless you’re insisting on the abstract arrangement of five letters being the object in question. I’m using it in direct reference to its adjectival contexts in your examples, none of which use it to speak of the borough north of Manhattan itself, but of its people and its products.
I can’t imagine someone living in the Bronx saying “I live in Bronx.” In fact I don’t even think of myself as being born in NYC, I think “I live in Jersey and was born in **the ** Bronx”. It would sound really odd for someone to use Bronx without the “the” in most contexts.
As an alumnus of the University at Albany, I can tell you that there is some (very) minor controversy over how to refer to the school. Most people, including most students, just say SUNY Albany, but at the student newspaper we were told in no uncertain terms that the school was to be referred to only as “the University at Albany.” Proper spelling was, apparently, optional, but they really cracked the whip on that “SUNY Albany” business.
One thing that amused me was in an early Bill Cosby Show, supposedly set in New York, where her referred to driving on the freeway.
“Freeway” is not used as the name for any highway in the New York City area (and AFAIK, not in anywhere in New York State). It isn’t the generic term for “highway,” either
If pressed the most common term would probably be “parkway,” though that’s a specific type of road (originally, no trucks or buses allowed and no route numbers, though these rules may have been loosened over the years in some cases). Around NYC you have parkways, expressways, and the Thruway (only one).
Highways too, I have occasionally had to ride on the West Side Highway (Joe DiMaggio) Highway either as an alternate to THE Stadium or to visit the museums.
As I think about that, is that the only “Highway” in NYC?
It’s so funny that you bring that up. It never occurred to me how natural that sounds. If you told me you grew up in a town with 500 people I’d imagine there would be one elementary school with a name like P.S. 119 or something.
Addresses are often just “Bronx, NY,” as olivesmarch4th said above. People wouldn’t write it that way if it sounded unnatural.
Here’s an example of Bronx used as a noun:
USS Da Bronx just would not sound right.
Even if most – or even almost all – people always say “the Bronx,” and never say “Bronx,” still, some people, some of the time, will respond “Bronx,” or “Bronx, New York,” when asked where they’re from, and it does not sound awkward.
I agree no one has ever said, or ever will say, “I live in Bronx.” I can easily, though, see someone saying, “I live in Bronx, New York, Alex.” “Alex, I’m from Bronx, New York.”
I was curious how the name evolved from Bronck’s, or Bronk’s, to Bronx with an x. An answer was closer than I thought. Cecil answered it in 1987. The relevant excerpt:
It’s “du Bronx”, as in “I was born in Yonkas(Yonkers), but now I live in duh Bronx.”
I assume that “New York” = Manhattan, unless someone says otherwise. I notice that people from Brooklyn tend to identify with a part of Brooklyn rather than the whole borough. As in “I’m from Flatbush”.
There is no Queens. I have relatives who lived in Flushing Meadows.
I have never met anyone who claimed to be from Staten Island. I think that it is actually a myth; nobody lives there, and New York City claimed it so as to have a place to dump garbage.
I live in Northern California. Saying “the 101” is a dead giveaway that you are from Southern California. Using “Frisco” for San Francisco is not and never has been acceptable.
Huh. My brother had an extraordinarily stupid social studies teacher in seventh grade, who insisted that the correct spelling was “Broncks” and “Bronx” was just a slang term. Looks like she was actually sort of right, just 250 years off :smack:
This, of course, does not let her off the hook for telling students that Bosnia is in Asia :rolleyes:
