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陳思融
 

 
 

The Big Apple and the Vanity Fair

 
 

Many large cities have nicknames. Paris is the City of Light. Chicago is the Windy City. San Francisco is the City by the Bay. But no city is as well known by its nickname as New York, the Big Apple. The nickname is almost as famous as the city itself, and yet few people have any idea where the name came from. After all, while New York is big, it must be well known for an abundance of apple orchards. But why, then, the big apple?

 
 

Well, the name actually has its origin in jazz. Te beginnings of jazz were in the musical culture of the black people in the American South. It found its home in New Orleans and then spread to cities in the north such as Kansas City and Chicago. But the northern city with the largest number of black residents was New York City, and so playing jazz in that city was the dream of every aspiring young jazz musician.

 
 

        Furthermore, jazz musicians develop a special language of their own such as chep, jive, cool, hot, boogie- woogie, behop, dude, all these are just some of the terms used by jazz players to describe the kind of music they make and the musicians who play it or those who come to listen to it. The language is black argot (slang). New York thus becomes the big apple, the city where dreams come true.

 
 

Unfortunately, it didn’t always work that way. A large number of jazz musicians died of alcoholism or drug addiction in Harlem, the city’s largest black neighborhood. It thus suggests that New York might just as well have been known as the city of broken dreams. Just as the apple offered by the serpent to Eve in the Garden of Eden a temptation she could not resist, so could not the ambitious resist the allure of New York.

 
 

And that is still the case today. Even though the black residents of Harlem and the jazz musicians themselves have dispersed throughout American society, New York is still the city to which young people from across the country are drawn to develop their talents as actors, painters, musicians, or writes. And immigrants to the city from all over the world hope to make them big there someday. For all these people with dreams, New York City is still the big apple.

 
     
 

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