Words

IF EVER a movie title were a hostage to fortune, it is Simply Irresistible. Despite Sarah Michelle Gellar - from Buffy, The Vampire Slayer - punters soon dropped away. Among the film's many faults, the New York Post noted, "the filmmakers think that the corner of Hudson and Jane streets is in TriBeCa - and that TriBeCa is some kind of down and dirty working-class nabe".

This abbreviation - like the more recent hood - has never crossed the Atlantic. It goes back to the mid- Thirties, to mean a local movie-theater rather than a first-run house. The OED stresses this usage but not the fact that soon after it came equally to mean an area. In the Seventies, there were also signs that it would come to mean something akin to our local, a neighbourhood bar.