Why not say frisco

And because Frisco shows disrespect for a city that is now big and proper and respectable. People wanted to seem proper, and cultured, so they listened to Caen and shunned it. It was just something that was instilled in me as a kid. Just kind of the root and background of that name and took it far, with T-shirts and tattoos and blew up that name.

After all, Caen was born in Sacramento. Working on this story one day, I grabbed a Lyft and got to talking with the driver, a guy named Lorenzo Beasley. Stanford linguist Teresa Pratt echoes that. Nicknames are even more like that.

Knowing which one to use and which one not to use tells people where you belong. Which brings us back to Rena, our question-asker, who suddenly felt out of place because she was called out for using Frisco.

Well, we have some good news for Rena. The famous Herb Caen eventually flip-flopped on Frisco a couple of times in the s. SFGate predicted awhile ago that the young and hip would revive it.

Search-Icon Created with Sketch. KQED is a proud member of. She used it for years, until one day she slipped it in while talking to a co-worker.

But we had to find out where these arguments originally came from. Read a great timeline from Mother Jones here. Author Charles Fracchia, the founder of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society , tells me nobody knows exactly where the word originated, but he thinks Frisco got its start in the late s — potentially from some drunkard making a contraction out of San Francisco. He thinks one of the first written uses was maybe on some sheet music, like this example from Other people say it may have come earlier, perhaps during the Gold Rush.

The other thing to know: Not long after people started using it, other people started hating it. They said only out-of-towners used it. Tourists, basically. But that has not been verified. One person we do know hated the word: Herb Caen, the revered columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

When he wrote about the city, people listened. There was kind of a lingua franca about them. Caen came along after the city had grown from a dinky West Coast outpost into a Gold Rush boomtown with saloons and debauchery, and later into a city that looked more like the East Coast and European cities it wanted to imitate. Francis of Assisi. And because Frisco shows disrespect for a city that is now big and proper and respectable. People wanted to seem proper, and cultured, so they listened to Caen and shunned it.

I guess I've reached maturity because really, I don't give a shit about the word anymore. And in fact, I find it more annoying hearing people telling others not to use than I do the use of the word itself! Especially when that scolding comes from someone who hasn't been in San Francisco for that long. So, in conclusion, I think telling people not to say Frisco has become the new "Frisco. Rain Jokinen was born and raised in San Francisco and, miraculously, still calls the city home.

Her future plans include becoming a millionaire, buying a condo complex, and then tearing it down to replace it with a dive bar. Lower right-hand corner. Is it cheating to have two Janis items on the list? No, it's not because she was Janis, and people who do not say Frisco are not as cool as Janis.

While this was a little surprising, it was nice to see SF Gate getting fully behind Call it Frisco day. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm palmy airair you can kissand palms. Along the storied Sacramento river on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of bayit was just before dawnwith the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across.

Crossing the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept for the first time since Denver soundly; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Third into the memory of the fact that I was in San Francisco three thousand two hundred miles from my mother's house in Ozone Park, Long Island.

I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was Frisco , long bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled about a few blocks. Weird bums it was Mission st. I heard music somewhere. Thanks, Gabe! It's true! As he wrote in an incredibly self-aware piece from :.

It's okay, you may call it 'Frisco' now. The gray-beards, the ones who objected so strenuously and endlessly to the 'irreverent' sailor-spawned nickname for San Francsico, are mostly gone now — and so, it must be added is a large part of the city they loved and helped to build, the city that spawned world legends and legions of worshippers. Old "Frisco" was the seaman's and adventurer's delight, the gaudy, lusty, gusty town that grew up overnight in floods of gold and silver, much of it to be squandered in the infamous deadfalls of the Barbary Coast or among the opium-smokers of Chinatown's dark corners.