Hacker News Reader

Comment by gphil | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in the Bay Area (and currently live on the East Coast) and I was not sure whether "The City" would refer to SF or NY. I guess it goes to show how myopic TechCrunch is that they didn't recognize that as being ambiguous for a national audience.

View on HN

For an international audience, "The City" means London's financial district. This is the only use of the term sufficiently common to be mentioned on Wikipedia's article.

Wikipedia aside, I respectfully disagree. Even for an international audience, context is important for interpreting "the city." NYT article: "the city" is New York. Economist article: "the city" is the City of London. TechCrunch: "the city" is San Francisco.

There was a TV show called Sex and the City, and that referred to New York.

I'd say either NY or London is fine for an international audience.

SF, not so much - and I hate, hate, hate how that reference shows the promise of the internet as a world without locality has been lost and turned into California, with the rest of the world as an afterthought.

(Australian here, for reference)

Of course, if you study a lot of medieval history, "The City" always means Constantinople (later Istanbul).

Except that was not in English.

Anyone interested in history or the bizarre would love the history of the City Of London Corporation. Business can vote, and their vote strength relates to employee numbers - that alone blew my mind when I learnt of it. Its well worth going down the rabbit hole if you have a spare bit of time. A good starting place for me was http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_95....

This awesome mapped survey data has relevant visualizations if you need them:

95. What is "the City"?

     a. New York City (46.99%)
     b. Boston (2.60%)
     c. DC (2.25%)
     d. LA (1.88%)
     e. Chicago (4.57%)
     f. other (41.72%)
     (9965 respondents)

Weird, when I lived in LA nobody called it that.

London...

I grew up, live in, and currently study in the Bay Area. If I am talking to someone, or if someone is talking to me, most references to "the city" will be clearly understood to mean San Francisco. Ex: I'm going up to the city. How was the city? I don't make it into the city that often. There's a concert in the city.

And the fact remains that the majority of the tech ecosystem is centered around the Bay Area, and hence the majority of TechCrunch's target audience.

I find it's best just to call it "San Fran" to disambiguate.

And for the entertainment value of indignant inhabitants of the area gasping like goldfish out of water as they prepare to tell you that no no no, it's not 'San Fran' and only someone completely ignorant of the most revered status of their fair (or foggy) city would make such a horrible faux pas :-)

"Frisco" works, too.

Not a problem, no one cares what you call SF any more. We'll just know that you're not from around here. And that's ok; we like meeting new people with strange and interesting ways of saying things.

Yep. Geographical context. no need to be a pedantic....

It's funny you're quick to call TechCrunch myopic yet you obviously didn't click through to read the article.

The full headline reads "As More Startups Move To San Francisco, Y Combinator Opens A Satellite Office In The City".

Not so ambiguous.

Yeah, I think the first clause was retroactively added to the title, because I did click through to read it before I posted--although I could have missed it and be embarrassingly wrong...

In any case, I'm surprised my criticism got so much discussion. It's hardly novel to call TechCrunch myopic, and not very insightful in retrospect. It was kind of just a knee-jerk reaction to a confusing (for me) original title. It just goes to show how important geography is to people, I suppose.

You can be pretentious about your local metro region and still be original. Consider Boston, "The hub of the universe", or "The Hub" for short. It exhibits all the hubris of having your own "The City" without all the confusion.

San Francisco needs their own Oliver Wendall Holmes to come up with something as catchy... or the rest of us can just agree to just start calling it "Frisco", which solves the confusion problem while trolling the city's inhabitants at the same time (a win-win)!

Thought they were talking about NYC for a moment.

Are you in tech? If so and you don't mind me asking, where does someone who's in tech, from the Bay Area, end up on the East Coast?

Yep, I'm even a startup founder (see my profile for more) and I live in Philly.

I went to college on the East Coast, and found that I just generally liked being on the East Coast more. I like the cities on the East Coast much more than SF. While I do miss some of the outdoor opportunities nearby, that's not really what I'm optimizing for at this point in my life. Mostly, I love being able to live in a hip, walkable and affordable neighborhood and not breaking the bank.

I also don't put that much credence in the theory that you have to be in the Bay Area (or anywhere in particular) to build a successful startup.

Where in the Bay did you grow up? I've been here most of the last 25 years, and it seems to me that throughout the Bay Area and for Bay Area writers/publications like TC, "The City" (often but not always capitalized) unambiguously means San Francisco.

I believe it was a specific affectation of Herb Caen, longtime SFChronicle columnist, to refer to SF as "The City" (capitalized).

Also, the phrasing and emphasis in hometown band Journey's regionally-popular song 'Lights' may help cement the phrase "the city" to mean SF, among locals. ("When the lights go down in The City... and the sun shines on the bay...") It's not just the generic/nearest 'city', but "The City".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com