“Gotham” has been a nickname for New York City since 1807, when Washington Irving used it in a magazine called Salmagundi. The magazine ran for 20 issues, and besides writing for it, Irving was also the publisher. The whole point of the publication was to satirize the city and everyone in it.
The reason Irving used “Gotham” was that in another story it already meant a place where fools lived — sort of. The older story, which comes from England sometime around the time of King John (the one associated with the Magna Carta, which would mean it happened between 1166 and 1216), and is about the king wanting to visit a particular village.
The story doesn’t say anything about just why he wanted to visit, but the villagers found out about it and thought it was a Very Bad Idea. After all, if the king comes to visit, he brings his whole court with him. Then, since he’s the king and all, when you live in the place he’s visiting it’s up to you to provide food and shelter for them all. They wanted no part of it.
The villagers came up with a Clever Plan. And remember, this is an old story; what passed as a Clever Plan might make as much sense as hiding inside a wooden horse and hoping somebody wheels it into the city you’re trying to invade. Anyway, their Clever Plan was to convince the king’s heralds (the advance scouts) that the whole village was either stupid or crazy. Their stunts included trying to catch the reflection of the moon in a pond by fishing, trying to catch a bird by surrounding a bush and clasping arms, and trying to kill a fish by drowning it.
Another thing about Clever Plans in old stories is that within the confines of the story, they can actually work. And this one did; King John changed his mind and didn’t visit the village after all. The village, of course, was Gotham.
There is a real village called Gotham in Nottinghamshire, England, but nobody is entirely sure if that’s the place in the story, because there’s also another Gotham in Dorset, England — and we’re talking nearly a thousand years ago, so there might have been some others. “Gotham” is just a descriptive name taken from Old English. It means “a place where goats live.” It was pronounced “goht-am” at the time; the “t” from “got” (for goat) and the “h” from “ham” (for home) didn’t merge into “th” for at least a few centuries.
Because of the story, “Gotham” was used both for a place inhabited by idiots and for an individual idiot. It shows up as early as the 1400s: “Now God gyf you care, Foles all sam! Sagh I neuer none so fare Bot the foles [fools] of Gotham.” It was so common that it even appeared in a dictionary in 1699: Wise Man of Gotham, a Fool.
Washington Irving’s story (or stories), too, worked pretty well to insert “Gotham” back into the language. It became so well known as a nickname for New York that businesses even adopted the name, as in Gotham Jewelers. That was the entry that Bill Finger spotted in a New York phone book in 1940 when he was trying to decide what to name a fictional city he was writing about for a new comic book he was going to call Batman. He didn’t know the history of the word, and evidently didn’t intend to imply that Batman lived in a city full of morons, even though in many cases that’s exactly how it appears. I mean, what’s with all those people wearing costumes? As Finger himself said later, “We didn’t call it New York because we wanted anybody in any city to identify with it.” But everybody pretty much knew what city it was anyway.
