  We revisit the local metaplectic correspondence previously constructed and
studied by Flicker and Kazhdan. After restoring and generalizing some of their
results, we get several interesting applications to the representation theory
of a Kazhdan-Patterson covering group over a $p$-adic field, including a full
criterion of the irreducibility of the Bernstein-Zelevinsky product of two
cuspidal representations, the classification of essentially square integrable
and tempered representations, and more interestingly, the calculation of the
Whittaker dimension of an irreducible representation.
