In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, Knox Bronson returns—hopefully for the last time—to San Francisco’s most emotionally charged semantic battlefield: the word “Frisco.”
Building on the earlier episodes Call It Frisco and Call It Frisco #2 — Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict, Knox dismantles two of the most commonly cited weapons in the anti-Frisco arsenal: Emperor Norton’s supposed 1872 proclamation banning the word, and Herb Caen’s famously stern admonition, Don’t Call It Frisco.
New historical research from the Emperor Norton Trust reveals that Norton’s decree almost certainly never existed at all—an invention of a 1939 biography that somehow hardened into accepted truth. Meanwhile, Herb Caen himself ultimately reversed course, publicly inviting the city to reclaim “Frisco” as the sailors’, adventurers’, and Gold Rush city it once was.
Along the way, we explore sailor slang, Gold Rush linguistics, cultural snobbery, postwar migration, and the shifting moral geography of San Francisco itself. The episode closes by giving the final word to legendary madam and restaurateur Sally Stanford, who reminds us that the city’s original characters never called it anything but Frisco.
This is less a debate than a historical reckoning—and perhaps a small act of linguistic liberation.
Shownotes courtesy of ChatGPT. I find perverse enjoyment these weird summations.
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