Pussy-Words of Manhattan Sophisticates
When Harold Ross and his colleagues boasted in 1925 that their new literary magazine The New Yorker would not be “edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” TIME ridiculed the claim as “pussy-words of Manhattan sophisticates.” An excerpt:
Dubuque, population 39,141, produces wagons, coffins, clothing, boots, river steamboats, barges, torpedo boats, was once rated the fourth important manufacturing centre in the U. S. It has a notable public library, an insane asylum, a business college. To an old lady in Dubuque there was sent a copy of The New Yorker. She was asked by telegram for an opinion. Replied she:
“I, and my associates here, have never subscribed to the view that bad taste is any the less offensive because it is metropolitan taste. To me, urbanity is the ability to offend without being offensive, to startle composure and to deride without ribaldry. The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity. They were quite correct, however, in their original assertion. The New Yorker is not for the old lady in Dubuque.”
