“Cooking with Gas” Origin

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Chris Stone and my fifth grade classroom, and we’re calling you from Francis Parker Lower School in San Diego, California.

Well, hello, Chris.

Oh, my goodness. They’re all there. Hello, everyone.

Well, we were recently doing an assignment about the power of adjectives and especially more mild-mannered adjectives. For instance, if you have an old car that you need to sell, we looked into using words like mature instead of old or well-traveled instead of letting the buyer know that there were actually 200,000 miles.

So I asked my students to write an ad about an obnoxious pet that they had to sell, and they had to use mild-mannered adjectives to describe the pet so that someone would actually want to buy it. And one of the boys named Leo looked up the word okay, and on the online thesaurus one of the things that came up was the phrase cooking with gas. And he came up to me and asked, well, what does this mean? And I said, I really don’t know. My only guess was that it came about at a time when people didn’t have gas to cook with, so it was something they were very excited to have. And that’s where it came about.

So I said, well, we need to call A Way with Words because they’ll know. So we’re asking that as our question.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Fantastic. I feel invested with hope and honor here to have a classroom listening to our words.

Yeah. Yeah. And you’re pretty close to the right answer. It came about at a time when cooking with gas was happening in the home because people were using that kind of gas on a stove. But there were electric stoves that were starting to compete with gas cooking.

Oh, okay. That did not come into our discussion at all. We thought it was going from wood maybe to gas.

No, no. These stoves had been around for a while, the ones that were using gas. But the natural gas industry actually had a campaign to encourage people to use those kinds of stoves. And so they had a catchphrase that was, now you’re cooking with gas.

Oh, my gosh. The kids are going to love this. That wasn’t even on our radar. So it’s natural gas and not gasoline like you might put in a car. That’s since they throw the modern year.

But the other thing is the way they started this campaign was really surreptitious. They didn’t launch any newspaper ads or nothing big in the movie theaters. What they did is they went to the writers of the popular radio shows of the day. These were the people who were like the TV stars of their day before there was TV. And they got them to put this line in the script for people like Jack Benny and Bob Hope. And so anytime something wonderful happened or somebody did something that deserved a sentiment of agreement, they said, now you’re cooking with gas, meaning now you’re doing the right thing, or now we’re on the road to success.

Wow. So about what time period are we looking at here?

We’re talking about the mid to late 1930s. Yeah, and it also got picked up by jazz musicians. It became very popular among musicians to use that phrase, and the general public picked it up as well for exactly the reason that Grant was describing.

Okay, well, we had no idea that it went this deeply.

Pretty cool, huh?

It’s very cool. They’ll be very interested to know all this.

Well, it’s great that Leo came to you with that question, huh?

It is very great that Leo came to us. You want to say thank you, Leo?

Thank you.

Thanks, buddy.

Hey, thank you, Leo. Keep on learning, dude.

Thanks so much for all of your help.

Yeah, sure.

Sure thing.

Bye, Chris.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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