{"id":8006,"date":"2014-07-28T00:03:27","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T04:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=8006"},"modified":"2014-07-28T00:03:27","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T04:03:27","slug":"it-all-comes-down-to-yo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/07\/it-all-comes-down-to-yo\/","title":{"rendered":"It All Comes Down to “Yo!”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Caption<\/a>
Pretzel Vendor, Stetson Junior High School, 3200 B Street, October 22, 1934. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the time before traffic, air conditioners, leaf blowers and the irritating like, the city\u2019s streets were full of cries. Not cries for help, but calls of peddlers selling (in summer) peaches, watermelons, and ice cream and (during the cooler months) pepper pot soup, hot muffins and split wood.<\/p>\n

Pretzels, of course, were sold all year round.<\/p>\n

One 19th<\/sup> century observer admittedly \u201castonished at the variety of noises which assail his ears on every side\u201d celebrated \u201cthe bawling cries of all sorts of petty traders and jobbers\u201d in a fine, illustrated book<\/a>. That was in 1850. Seventy years later, Kate Rowland worried about the \u201cpassing away of the old Philadelphia street criers,\u201d and collected dozens which she \u201cperformed\u201d at a meeting of the Philadelphia City History Society. Rowland demonstrated the city still had vendors with traditions, tireless lungs and occasional musical ability. From the publication that followed<\/a>, we know the proper intonation for \u201cPretzels!,\u201d as well as that for potatoes, strawberries, cherries, shad, cat fish, lavender, sweet corn, hominy cakes, umbrellas, brooms and soft soap, among many other goods and services.<\/p>\n

\"Pretzels<\/a>
From Street Cries of Philadelphia, by Mrs. A. J. Rowland,Philadelphia City History Society, 1922. (Private collection.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Philadelphia street culture at its best, you might say. Even though “Yo!” was conspicuously absent.<\/p>\n

Where are we today with our street cry tradition? You might say it all comes down to that one generic expression\u2014\u201cYo!\u201d\u2014a pronouncement powerful enough to go up against today\u2019s traffic noise and flexible enough to mean whatever one might intend. Today, \u201cYo!\u201d seems to work just about anywhere and is made to work for just about anything.<\/p>\n

\u201cYo!\u201d came into this world as an abbreviation of \u201cgualione\u201d which means \u201cyoung man\u201d or \u201ckid\u201d in Italian dialect. A Neopolitan song titled Gualione<\/em> was a hit in the 1950s, especially Perez Prado\u2019s excellent Mambo version<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If Cassell\u2019s Dictionary of Slang<\/a><\/i> can be believed, \u201cgualione\u201d was shortened to \u201cwalyo.\u201d \u201cYo!\u201d wasn\u2019t far behind. In the 1970s, we witnessed \u201cYo\u2019s\u201d Rocky road from South Philadelphia to Hollywood. And more recently, it\u2019s been adopted as Jesse Pinkman meta catchphrase.<\/p>\n

But propelled by the media, \u201cYo!\u201d forgot its roots.<\/p>\n

In 1993, New York claimed as their own this \u201cshort and sweet\u201d greeting and had the temerity to even suggest \u201cthere is no yo in Philadelphia<\/a>.\u201d What the writer really meant <\/i>to say was \u201cPhiladelphia, once again, has provided the world with something of great value.\u201d<\/p>\n

The recent launch of a free app of the same name (available on iTunes<\/a>) once again makes clear that this strong, accessible, and possibly elegant utterance has morphed, as the Yo people put it: into \u201cthe simplest & most efficient communication tool in the world.\u201d At least that\u2019s what their investors, who extended their faith to the tune of $1 million<\/a>, fervently hope.<\/p>\n

Thanks to this start up now based in San Francisco, what started on the streets of Philly is now, everywhere and is everyone\u2019s. Not only is Yo (the app) available in English, it\u2019s also offered in Arabic, Bokm\u00e5l, Norwegian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.<\/p>\n

What is there for a Philadelphian to say?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re welcome\u201d would be about right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the time before traffic, air conditioners, leaf blowers and the irritating like, the city\u2019s streets were full of cries. Not cries for help, but calls of peddlers selling (in summer) peaches, watermelons, and ice cream and (during the cooler months) pepper pot soup, hot muffins and split wood. Pretzels, of course, were sold all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}