All the Internet fun being caused by Congressman Anthony Weiner helps explain why New Yorkers and Bostonians are always at odds about baseball, hockey, clam chowder, and so forth and so forth. I'm a Bostonian. All these years I honestly thought a weiner was a hot dog. But Weiner's weiner (actually, as the link describes, he's not sure it's his) is not that kind of wiener.
Which reminds me of the good old days when men were men and none of them would get caught dead saying the word Twitter. This was when mincomputers ruled the information technology world, and New York was a place where your company had both a Wall St. and midtown office (so it was easy to make both a morning and afternoon meeting, stop off in Chinatown or Little Italy for lunch, catch the Eastern Shuttle in both directions, and still be home in time for twilight golf).
I worked in the marketing department at Data General and one of the copywriters came in with a great idea for an internal sales promotion piece. It pointed out all the ways that the Data General minicomputer of the day was far superior to the Wang Laboratories mincomputer of the day (or DG office automation was better than Wang office automation... or whatever). So we polished up the comparison, had the art director make it look good and readable, and together the three of us -- all Bostonians -- came up with a headline:
"Beat Wang! Sell More Minicomputers."
Not too creative I admit but straightforward and to the point. That's what sales promotion is supposed to do. So we took it to the vice president, who was a New Yorker, to get his sign off. Here is the cleanest explanation I could find on the Internet for the problem we had with the VP. It comes from a parenting web site on the Albany NY newspaper so don't be afraid to click on it. (I can only guess at what vulgar lists I got myself on looking for this clean explanation.)
And this whole different meaning of words thing really bothers me now because two of my grandchildren are New Yorkers.
-- Dennis Byron