“Immigrant Street Poetry”

Yes, “Immigrant Street Poetry.” Ugh. The Times details “The Grate Amrican Dreem”:

This may be the age of Internet pop-ups and text-message marketing, but lots of businesses – especially small businesses – still do most of their advertising with old-fashioned low-tech signs. And just as the eyes are said to be windows to the soul, these storefront signs – which often come with fractured grammar and mysterious spelling – can be portals on a great city that is regenerating itself with a flood of new immigrants.

The signs are there to lure customers, of course, but they can do much more. Four out of 10 current New Yorkers were born in a foreign country, more than at any other time since the 1920’s, and many have gone immediately into business. Their signs can form a style all their own, and style, as E. B. White, a passionate New Yorker at heart, once observed, is sometimes nothing but “sheer luck, like getting across the street.”

With such luck, the errors in usage add unintended meaning, like the East Side pizzeria that for a long time listed “1 litter” bottles of soda on its menu. So many one-liter bottles end up as litter that such a change might be appropriate.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, all you all can’t spell for shit but you’re loveable just the same!

But as usual, our hard-working, slightly less literate bretheren have the last laugh:

One pizzeria on 41st Street has spaguetti with clam sause, and a lunch cart on Lexington Avenue and 46th Street helps out-of-towners by spelling knish “kanish.”

“People tell me it’s wrong and I told my brother-in-law, who is the owner, but he doesn’t want to change it,” said Wael Ahmed, 39, an Egyptian immigrant who works at the stand with kanish and chees steak on the menu. “Sometimes people on the street also tell me it’s wrong, but I tell them it doesn’t matter because we don’t sell knish anymore.”

To crudely paraphrase New York City uber-Historian Ken Jackson, history is for losers — step off, Times!