The Grand Central Station terminal clock in New York City. A round, four-faced clock adorning the top of an information kiosk in the main hall of the terminal.
10 June 2021
Late-night talk-show host Johnny Carson allegedly once defined a New York minute as the time between a traffic light turning green and the driver of the car behind you honking their horn. More precisely and less humorously, it is a very brief interval of time, an instant. The phrase would seem to come from the fast pace of life in New York City, although there is an anomalous early citation that casts some doubt on this being the origin.
Unsurprisingly, the phrase New York minute doesn’t have its origin in New York city itself. It is clearly a term coined by those who don’t live in the city to describe what they think living there is like. The earliest unambiguous use of the phrase that I have found is a description of horse-drawn traffic in Leavenworth, Kansas, hardly a bustling metropolis. From the Leavenworth Bulletin of 12 July 1870:
Fast driving is rampant in this city. No effort is made to prevent it. Drivers and pleasure seekers try to fly from one end of town to the other in about a New York minute. When dusk and night approach, it becomes still more lovely. Mark this: A circumstance will occur on one of our streets ere long, if the game continues.
If the speed of horses and buggies awed this correspondent, imagine what they would make of traffic in the Big Apple today. Everything is relative, I guess.
Another early citation comes a month later from Titusville, Pennsylvania. The 13 August 1870 issue of the Titusville Herald carried this story of a man who found a mountain lion under his bed:
Hastily rising, he jerked on his unmentionables and, dropping on all fours, began to claw beneath the bed after the midnight intruder. He found it, and in one-fourth of a New York minute all the clothes there were upon him would not have made a bib for a China doll. He finally found himself in the corner partly scalped, with his lower limbs looking as though he had been through a wool carding machine; while at this juncture, with a spit and a growl, a catamount disappeared through the open window.
That would seem to be it. A rather straightforward origin, except...
There is this use of York minute from forty years earlier. It appears in a 13 July 1830 journal entry of Joseph Pickering, an Englishman traveling through the Great Lakes region, between Canada and the United States. He uses the phrase in a description of an inn in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, and from the context it is clear he is referencing York, Ontario (a.k.a. what is now Toronto), not New York City:
By the time they have all taken a “drink” or two a-piece, and swallowed a mouthful of water after it, you will hear “guessing” and “calculating” enough, undoubtedly, and something better, “I don’t think!” Be careful they do not tread on your toes at this time, and if you wish to retain a seat, do not get up from it even for a “York minute.”
There are several possibilities here. One is that the two phrases were coined independently, referring to the nearest or most famous big city—although back then York/Toronto was hardly a even a city—less than 3,000 people compared to over 180,000 in New York of the era. Or, it could be that New York minute was already in circulation in 1830, and Pickering was playing with the existing phrase. It is not unheard of for slang phrases to go unrecorded for decades, so this explanation isn’t out of the question. A third possibility is that the phrase did in fact originally refer to York/Toronto, and as it gained a purchase in the United States, Americans appropriated it for their own, and York transformed into New York.
Sources:
“Couldn’t Stand the Cats.” Titusville Herald (Pennsylvania), 13 August 1870, 3. NewspaperArchive.com.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. New York, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. New York, n.
Pickering, Joseph. Journal entry, 13 July 1830. Emigration or No Emigration. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830. 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Safire, William. “In a New York Minute.” New York Times Magazine, 19 October 1986, 12.
“A Wandering Wife’s Return.” Leavenworth Bulletin (Kansas), 12 July 1870, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Tony Hisgett, 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.