Dear Car Talk:
My daughter just moved to Boston and teaches at a Cambridge elementary school. Whenever I refer to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in our conversations, I always say “our fair city.” That’s from you and your brother. You used to always call Cambridge “our fair city” on your radio show.
But when my daughter asked why you always said, “our fair city,” I realized I don’t know. What’s the origin of that phrase? How did you guys come up with it? There is no official reference anywhere. Thanks. — Jim
Well, congratulations to your daughter on educating the youth of our fair city, Jim. She’s a little too late to help me, but I’m sure plenty of kids will benefit from her work.
Every week on the radio show, we would do a “puzzler.” And one week I introduced a puzzler that went like this:
A well-dressed man walks into a bank, goes up to the teller, and says: “I’m an English professor from Northwestern University, and I’m here visiting your fair city with my wife and my two daughters.”
Anyway, for some reason, that phrase struck my late brother Tom as ridiculous. And he asked incredulously, “Your fair city??? He actually said that? Your fair city???”
And from that moment on, to make fun of me, whenever I gave out our mailing address on the air, he would barge in and interject “our fair city” between the words “Cambridge” and “Massachusetts.”
So that’s where it comes from, Jim. And now, because I’m sure you’re dying to know the rest of the puzzler, here it is:
This professor goes on to say “You see, my wife and my oldest daughter want to go shopping, and all I have is this out-of-state check. I wonder if you would be kind enough to cash it for me?”
The bank teller says, “Get out of here, you bum. You’re no visiting English professor, you’re a fraud.” And the puzzler question was, how did the bank teller know that this guy was trying to pull a fast one?
Well, the answer is that the so-called professor said he had two daughters. Yet he referred to one as his “oldest” daughter. Any professor of English would have known that it should be “older” daughter, not “oldest” if there are only two of them. So that’s how the bank teller nabbed him.
I guess we had some pretty smart bank tellers in Our Fair City, Jim. Thanks, no doubt, to all those good teachers we hire.
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