FIVE LITTLE PHRASES AND HOW THEY GREW
Hold the phone, bite the burrito, take the cake, dodge the bullet — American is full of short, pithy phrases that speak volumes. But where did they come from? How did they spread? Here’s a short history of five such phrases, with Google N-grams, Google’s graph of a word’s usage in the jillions of books it has digitized.
PUSH THE ENVELOPE: During WWII, pilots were given flight instructions in envelopes that specifically limited speed, altitude, and other factors. But being pilots, they often ignored these limits, a practice that became known as “pushing the envelope.” After the war, the phrase jumped to test pilots whose job was pretty much non-stop envelope pushing. Some of these pilots became astronauts and in 1979, when Tom Wolfe was researching his book The Right Stuff, he latched onto the phrase. The movie of the book spread it through the culture.
2. BITE THE DUST: You’re thinking of some old Western, probably, or of the Queen song “Another One Bites the Dust.” Wrong again, honey. Some version of this fatal phrase dates to, believe it or not, Homer’s Iliad where a warrior is said to “bite the bloody sand.” The phrase’s American seed probably came from the Bible’s Psalm 19 reading “They that dwell in the Wilderness shall bow before him and his enemies shall lick the dust.” From scripture to the Old West was not far in a country of the Bible literate and “bite the dust” debuted in print in a US Army report on the Mexican War (1846). It soon entered dime novels about the Old West and from there has never fallen out of use.
3. CUT TO THE CHASE: This phrase for getting to the point emerged in early Hollywood when chase scenes were part of almost every film. The phrase first appeared in print in a 1955 detective novel, then became standard in the 1980s.
4. WING IT: Vaudeville gave birth to this one, using it to describe an unprepared actor who must take cues from a prompter standing offstage “in the wings.” Since about 1960, the phrase has applied to anyone who tries something without “doing his homework.”
5. BOUGHT THE FARM: Pilots again, this time from the Korean War. Someone noticed that when military planes crash into fields, the landowner often sues the government for huge sums. So the ill-fated pilot “bought the farm.” The phrase hit the New York Times in 1954, made the movies in the 1968 film “Green Berets,” made the CBS Evening News in 1973 and has been rising ever since.
For more, see Let’s Talk Turkey: The Stories Behind America’s Favorite Expressions, by Rosemarie Ostler (Prometheus Books, 2008.