23 Skidoo

It should be breezy today and tomorrow. While Gothamist thinks breezy is a fun word to say aloud, its use indicates that not much is happening weatherwise. We may see some clouds from Tropical Storm Nicole as it moves northward toward Nova Scotia, and later in the week we may get some rain as what remains of Tropical Depression Matthew, which dumped craploads of rain on Louisiana, gets caught up in a trough of low pressure as the trough moves through our area on Thursday.

There's a legend that the old expression "23 Skidoo" originated near the Flatiron Building at 23rd St and Broadway/Fifth Avenue. The story, as it goes, is that young men would hang out at that breezy corner waiting for young ladies to pass. The breeze would lift the lady's skirts revealing some ankle. The police, so the legend goes, would tell the men to skedaddle by saying "Twenty-three skidoo!" While all that may be true, local word origin expert Barry Popik has uncovered that the phrase was used in Chicago several years before the Flatiron Building was completed.