MI Printing: Word Myths: Windy City

What is the Windy City Myth that the newspapers just will not let go of. The story goes that the nickname for Chicago was coined in 1890 by Charles Dana, the editor of the New York Sun. Chicago was competing with New York to host the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and Dana allegedly used the name as a derogatory moniker for the competition. Supposedly the term is not a reference to the winds off Lake Michigan as one might suppose, but rather refers to the Chicagoan habit of rabid boosterism and shameless boasting. To a New Yorker like Dana, Chicago was full of hot air, hence the Windy City.

That the story is false is not exactly new information. Mitford Mathew's Classic Dictionary of Americanisms, published over fifty years ago and long a standard reference book for American slang, includes a citation of Windy City from 1887, three years before the fight with New York over hosting the exposition and Dana's alleged coining of the phrase. The citation is repeated in the Oxford English Dictionary.  Anyone who did the least bit of research on the term would have discovered the Dana story to be untenable but newspapers just keep quoting each other to perpetuate the myth.