“The forgotten middle class…”

On October 3, 1991, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, held a press conference in Little Rock to announce that he was officially running as a candidate to be the Democratic nominee…

“Have Gun – Will Travel” lives on (as a linguistic “snowclone” and via modern digital media)

Today, the linguistic formula “Have X [some work tool] – Will Y [do something]” is firmly cemented into our language. Prior to 1957, it wasn’t. Then, on September 14, 1957,…

The Birth — and Death — of “the Hippies”

Credit for the origin of the term “hippies” is generally given to San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon. Fallon coined the term in an article published in the San Francisco Examiner…

The backstory on “Snug as a bug in a rug.” (Spoiler Alert: Ben Franklin didn’t actually coin it.)

In 1771, Ben Franklin’s common-law wife, Deborah Read Franklin shipped a live gift to young Georgiana Shipley, the daughter of British friends in London. It was an American gray squirrel…

“How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?”

The phrase “beautiful people” had been used prior to the 1960s. For example, in Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband, a social comedy first performed in 1895, one of the…

“The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” (“Endlösung der Judenfrage”)

“The Final Solution” is one of the most chilling phrases associated with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s a euphemism for genocide. “The Final Solution” was immortalized by a memo…

The day Leo Durocher said “Nice guys finish last.” (Or something like that.)

The famous sports quote “Nice guys finish last” has long been attributed to legendary baseball player and manager Leo Durocher. But for decades there has been a debate about whether…

“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

The word “chiffon” started out as a French term for a rag or small piece of cloth. Several centuries ago, fabric and clothing manufacturers adopted it as the name of…

“Back in the Saddle Again”

The idiom “back in the saddle again” was already in use before it was immortalized in song by the singing cowboy star Gene Autry. It was originally applied to cowboys…

“A boy’s best friend is his mother.”

When Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho was first released to movie theaters on June 16, 1960, it wasn’t immediately embraced by critics. For example, in a review published the next day…