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Howdy-_______________________________________________
From: Bernard Cleyet <bernardcleyet@redshift.com>
bc, who wonders on the relation ship of "The Times-Picayune" and the
adjective.
The Picayune was a newspaper, long ago, that was printed in New Orleans. As Brian suggests, "picayune" is an expression that means small and unimportant, derived from the name of a small Spanish coin. "Picayune" has a long history in New Orleans as being a particular kind of humorous story that is only a sentence or two long that is particularly revealing about the subject.
New Orleans has other colorful expressions like "lagniappe" which means "a little something extra" and is used in phrases like "the darling at the counter gave me my poor boy and cold drink and, as lagniappe, a cookie".
We also call the strip of land in the middle of a street a "neutral ground" rather than a median.
Marc "Zeke" Kossover
who now lives in San Francisco, but thinks of his hometown of New Orleans often
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