GrouSu (n.): group suicide

New York City likes to call itself a “City of Neighborhoods,” and it’s certainly true that between the ethnic enclaves, specialized commercial districts, and salient manmade geographical features, the city is broken into pieces that have clear character and distinctive attributes — a walk from the West Village across town to Chinatown makes that much abundantly clear. But neighborhoods often have malleable borders. Sure, some neighborhoods have one firm line, often specified in the name (everyone knows what SoHo is south of), but very rarely are the absolute borders of a neighborhood completely delineated on all sides.

This openness to interpretation means that neighborhood definitions have become the province of real estate brokers, who are forever trying to redraw the borders of desirable neighborhoods to encompass more and more blocks. This is especially true in Brooklyn, where neighborhoods like Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Clinton Hill, and Williamsburg steadily creep east, west and south, east, and east and south, respectively, gobbling up swaths of less desirable areas whose names have unsavory associations (e.g. Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick).

For the areas that they can’t reasonably fold into Park Slope, realtors invent new names that they hope will be fashionable and sticky. These names are often ridiculous and unnecessary — no one realistically refers to Hell’s Kitchen as “Clinton,” and no matter how much they try to tell me I live in “Greenwood Heights,” well, I don’t, ’cause that place doesn’t really exist. The worst offenders by far, though, are the ones that try to extend the naming model of SoHo and TriBeCa to new zones. And so it happened in conversation Friday night that confirmed bestie Liz coined GrouSu, as in, “So you couldn’t afford anything in BoCoCa, SpaHa, or SoBro? Have you and your roommates considered GrouSu?”

Tags: coinages