A while back I noticed a news story that said: “North Korean missile tests signal return to brinkmanship.” It made me decide to look up the origin of that term.…
“Greed is all right” — the forerunner of “Greed is good”
Wall Street whiz Ivan Boesky was riding high in 1986. During the early 1980s, he’d made hundreds of millions of dollars trading stocks, doing real estate deals and masterminding leverage…
“Come Together” — the Timothy Leary political campaign slogan that became a Beatles song…
The best-known slogan coined by Sixties counterculture celebrity Timothy Leary is the one he created to promote the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs: “Turn on, tune in, drop…
“Too cheap to meter” – the infamous nuclear power phrase…
In the annals of the long, still-ongoing debate over nuclear power, the most infamous words are undoubtedly “too cheap to meter.” The origin of this phrase is a speech given…
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Like virtually all African Americans who grew up in Mississippi during the first half of the 20th century, Fannie Lou Hamer endured many injustices in her life. Some went beyond…
“I coulda been a contender!”
When On the Waterfront was first released to American movie theaters on July 28, 1954, the film’s director, Elia Kazan, was worried about how well it would do on opening…
“I never promised you a rose garden.”
THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMOUS LINE: “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” Hannah Green (pen name of Joanne Greenberg; 1927–1996) American author Title of her 1964 novel This novel, first published on April…
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall…”
When Columbia Records released the first, self-titled album by Bob Dylan in 1962 it went largely unnoticed by the general public. Only about 5,000 copies were sold at the time.…