The formerly forbidden food is now being served as a “Kosher Parve Cheeseburger” at the popular glatt kosher eatery, which does not serve meat and dairy together, in accordance with Jewish law.

While many are excited to give the taboo take-out a taste, others are kvetching that the burger is bad news.

“I would never entertain the thought of eating cheese — real or fake — with meat,” comedian Jackie Mason, who keeps kosher, told The Post. “It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.”

Trying to skirt tradition is what irks others, also.

“Jewish law is very concerned for appearances,” said Rabbi Basil Herring, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America. “Not only should you always do the right thing, but it should be seen as the right thing.

Does anybody really speak that way anymore? Did anyone ever, really? In the New York of 2008, where small shops and whole blocks meet the wrecking ball at every turn, is the New York accent on the way out, too, shamed into obsolescence as each generation adopts a kind of speech Ralph Kramden wouldn’t recognize?

You can take that concern and just fuggedaboudit.

The New York accent is very much alive, linguists will happily tell you, but like all dialects — and that’s what our accent is — it’s changing. To be sure, it’s been a long time since anyone called a toilet a “terlet.” But many of us still drink “cawfee” and call our “fathas” on Father’s Day. What’s also true is that fewer of us, especially younger New Yorkers, are speaking this way in our increasingly mobile and diverse city. That said, you’d be mistaken to conclude that means New York talk is going the way of the Third Avenue El.

. . .

The New York accent is part of a broader East Coast way of speech, with major distinctions in places such as Boston and Philadelphia. Our accent fits like a glove in between these two geographic zones, and the forces buffeting it include immigration waves, the city’s transient young population and New Yorkers’ tendency to clean up their speech. So it should come as no surprise that if indeed any part of the city is sounding less like New York, it’s Manhattan.

“New York more than a great many other places is subject to homogenization,” Jochnowitz said, “And I think that has already happened in Manhattan, where kids growing up in most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan don’t have New York accents anymore.”

What they’re hanging on to in Manhattan, Jochnowitz said, are certain pronunciation distinctions he feels are worth preserving.

“Although I made all my drastic decisions on my own, Hollywood intensified my love for that life and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant,” Bonanno crime-family informant Francesco Fiordilini said at his sentencing for killing a drug dealer in 1993.

“The mob is a gang. It’s made up of individuals with very low self-esteem who together feed on the weak — and most of the time their own,” Fiordilini told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.

The citywide increase reflects a national upward trend in the number of cesarean deliveries in recent years. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the national cesarean rate in 2006 reached a record high, 31.1%, according to its preliminary birth data for that year.

“There is alarming concern throughout the country that there are too many cesarean sections,” said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, who in 2006 released a report based on 2005 data detailing individual hospitals’ cesarean section rates. “It’s additional cost and it’s additional risk,” Ms. Gotbaum said, adding, “I hate to impart motives on hospitals and doctors . . . I can just tell you the numbers speak for themselves.”

“It’s clearly been rising,” the head of obstetrics at Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center, Dr. Iffath Hoskins, said. “On a day-to-day basis, there will be three or four cesareans going on at a given time,” she said, estimating that one in three deliveries at Lutheran results in a cesarean.

. . .

The overall increase in cesareans has also been triggered by the changing perception of cesareans among women.

“There’s such a relaxed attitude about induction and c-sections that it’s not considered risky anymore,” the president of the group Choices in Childbirth, Elan McAllister, said.