Amy from Abilene, Texas, is moving to the Northeast, and a realtor in her new hometown told her that once the paperwork went through, bada boom, bada bing, she’d have a new home. Amy and her husband had only heard it in movies and on TV. Millions know it from The Godfather (1972), where Sonny Corleone says bada bing while demonstrating how close to get to the target. But the phrase never appears in Mario Puzo’s novel, and song archives show bada bing, bada boom in print by the mid-1960s. Across 30 or 40 variant spellings, it works like ta-da or a drum’s rimshot, the flourish after a punchline, not the sound of gunfire. It may go back to vaudeville, but no earlier record has surfaced. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Where Does “Bada Boom, Bada Bing” Come From? Earliest Known Print Examples Date to the Mid-1960s, Not Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Amy Shethby calling from Abilene, Texas.
Hey, Amy, welcome.
How are you doing? What can we do for you?
I’m great. I have a question about a word that I recently heard.
My husband and I are preparing to move up to the Northeast, and we’ve been on the phone with a lot of different realtors.
And one of the realtors that we recently spoke with, her name was Linda, and she was talking to us about the process of applying to different places that we were interested in.
And she said, okay, Amy, here’s the deal.
You need to fill out a lot of paperwork.
But once we get your paperwork processed, bada boom, bada bing, you’ll have a place in no time.
And my husband and I just totally died laughing because we’ve never heard anybody say bada boom, bada bing outside of like a movie or a TV show.
And it made me wonder, where did that come from?
So, yeah, you nailed part of it.
The Godfather is the movie that brought this expression to the attention of most people.
There’s a scene in this 1972 movie where Sonny Corleone, who is the older, more aggressive, kind of more brutish brother, is talking to his brother Michael, who’s the college boy, who’s a little quieter, a little more disciplined about having to go shoot a police captain.
And I won’t read it here because it’s a little violent, but he does say, he says, you got to get up close like this and bada bing, right?
And then do the act.
But the thing is, that’s not the first use that we know of that expression in print.
It wasn’t in Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather.
But there’s some other archives of songs and different kinds of things that have this from the 1960s, where the full expression bada bing, bada boom appears.
And there are something like 30 or 40 variant spellings of this.
And they all somehow suggest, they suggest like the ta-da or the presto chango of like the magician’s act.
Or even better, they suggest like the drum kit doing the little tch-tch at the end of a joke or the end of a moment.
Or like when the rabbit comes out of the hat and the girl steps up.
Yeah, like bada bing.
Yeah, bada bing.
And the girl comes out from behind the curtain, that sort of thing.
Okay, so it’s not the sound of gunfire.
It’s not the sound of gunfire.
It’s just about like the moment at which the act happens.
That’s kind of the flourish.
Ta-da.
Yeah.
You do it.
I’d looked up the term, and one theory I saw dated it back to, like, vaudeville days, when, like, the magic act would happen, and then the drum kit would go, ba-da-ching.
Yeah, it’s possible, however, when we look at the origins of words, we can only go by the spellings.
And even though there are 30-some-odd different spellings of this, we haven’t found it earlier than, I say we, meaning people who study word histories, we haven’t found it earlier than the mid-1960s.
So it’s possible that it’s older, but if so, we haven’t found it.
That’s so cool.
That’s really interesting.
Well, Amy, good luck with your move.
Thank you so much.
Sure.
Take care now.
Safe travels.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
So we know that you’re hearing words and phrases all the time that catch your ear and you start wondering about them.
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