On The Fly

In this episode, The BIG Apple . . . Have you ever wondered how New York City got the name The BIG Apple? What follows is consolidated from Wikipedia & the Interesting Facts e-newsletter. Before it was referred to as The City That Never Sleeps, the term "Big Apple" was an expression that meant a big deal, an object of great desire, or big dreams. The first time New York City was referred to as the "big apple" in print may have been in 1909 when American journalist Edward S. Martin wrote in his book The Wayfarer in New York that those in the Midwest (Kansas) are "apt to see in New York a greedy city. It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap." - However, the phrase doesn't seem to have been intended as a nickname, especially since the name was not capitalized. A horse-racing column published by the New York Morning Telegraph in the 1920s popularized the term: " The Big Apple. ” “The dream of ev...