Discussion Forum (Archived)
Guest
I remember my mother using the expression "cooking with gas" referenced in a recent AWWW broadcast. She would occasionally augment the expression to "cooking with gas on the left front burner," presumably the most powerful of the burners on the stove top. This may have been unique to her, since I don't see reference to it on the interwebs.
I do find an occasional "raining cats and dogs and horses ... . " or some such.
More than augmenting idioms, I appreciate the apt twist of an idiom. Sometimes this borders on punnish bad taste. But when it is good it is very, very good. e.g. "Through the Valley of the Shadow of Debt."
Glenn said: I remember my mother using the expression "cooking with gas" ...
I swear I recall seeing some ads by the local utility when I was a child. They were "plumbing" our small town with distribution lines for natural gas, a new option at that time, as most people heated with fuel oil or coal. There was a promo ad being run on TV (and newspapers) showing a happy housewife cooking on her new gas range. The voice-over extolled the benefits of gas as a heat source. The ad ended with "Now you're cooking with gas."
Seems to me that ad would have to predate its use as the idiom you asked about. Ngrams shows a spike in usage at that point in time (the 50s). Curiously, it also shows usage ramping-up starting around 1890. Wiki tells me natural gas distribution began in New York in 1825, and that's about where the first "blip" appears on Ngrams. An etymology search found nothing.
Does anyone else recall this ad campaign?
From what I've read, "Now You're Cooking With Gas" was popularized by Bob Hope around 1940, and originated by Deke Houlgate, in the WWI era, when Deke was working for the American Gas Association. That doesn't fly with me; I think Hope was a Bob-come-lately to this particular rodeo..
Comics don't normally inject lines into the language; they appropriate lines people are familiar with, and perhaps use them in a new context. You might as well have credited Steve Martin with, "Well, excuuuuuuse me!" by ignoring the fact that it was pretty common even when Martin was born.
They used "Now you're cooking with gas!" to promote towngas ranges in the 1920s or before, according to my grandmother in a conversation I overheard in the 1950s. I'm not exactly sure when towngas was popular. It was a low-energy gaseous fuel piped to homes and businesses, manufactured by municipalities by heating solid fuel in a process similar to how coke and charcoal are made, as I understand it. It was supplanted by less expensive natural gas when enough pipelines were built
deaconB, your grandma's memories -- and your memory of her memories -- would need to be backed up by printed evidence in order to change what is known about the origin of that phrase. There is no such evidence so far found that predates the 1930s. People's memories are terrible, so we simply can't rely upon them. (My favorite example of someone with a poor memory is the guy who swears he coined "laser," with the same meaning as we all know it -- a term for which we are 100% certain of the origin; his memory had it appearing much earlier, which was impossible.)
Also, "Comics don't normally inject lines into the language" is specious. Of course they do. It's the popularizer who matters, not the coiner, and it has always been so. Comics are often popularizers. Sometimes the popularizer *is* the coiner, of course, but still: there must be popularizers (or more than one) for a word, catchphrase, or idiom to catch on.
And Google Ngrams are not to be trusted, except in the aggregate. Colleagues have examine outlier spikes and found them to be misdatings in Google Books, from which the Ngrams data is taken. If you can't find the actual book or periodical, with a full-page view and a readable date attached, it can't be trusted.
Some writing on the subject:
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/22228/GB_Metadata.pdf?sequence=1
Thanks Grant, for those illuminating links on Ngrams. I've often found discrepancies in their corpus, and learned early on to only trust the "aggregate" as you suggest. Kinda the same way it used to be with Wikipedia, though they've improved greatly over time. I didn't really understand the source of the Ngram errors until I read your first link.
I checked that outlying early blip for "cooking with gas" around 1840 and it was indeed a reference to early systems of gas cooking and heating, though probably not using the methane now provided by pipelines throughout much of the developed world. As deaconB suggested, other forms of gas derived from fossil fuels were in limited use in some locations.
My intent was to find the first use of the phrase "now you're cooking with gas" but Ngrams returned zip for that, so I settled on "cooking with gas" for my search and that's what shows up in my previous link. Given that I recall that phrase as basically "ad copy" I'm not surprised, but you'd think its use as an idiom would have shown up by, say, the 60s or 70s, where the Ngram plot shows an upturn in usage. And sure enough, some of the cited works include that idiom, with the implied meaning "now you're doing it right."
So I did another Ngram search for "you're cooking with gas" and got this interesting result. It correlates well with the ad campaign I recalled.
Grant Barrett said
deaconB, your grandma's memories -- and your memory of her memories -- would need to be backed up by printed evidence in order to change what is known about the origin of that phrase. There is no such evidence so far found that predates the 1930s.
You needed a fairly small community to have towngas. If you had a larger community, merchants marketed LP from Skelgas or Philips, If you had a small market, you either paid through the nose for shipping of partial truckloads - common carriers didn't want to haul LP, viewing it as potential bombs - and if you bought a whole truckload infrequently, not only did that take a lot of capital, but you'd [ay a fortune on demurrage. When the natural gas pipelines were laid in then 1930s-1950s, town fathers were eager to shut down their towngas generating plants as expensive, dangerous, and temperamental, and they'd sell their gas distribution systems for nearly nothing to any company that that would distribute natural gas.
And what newspapers existed in those small towns? They used sheet-fed flatbed presses, typically folding the newspapers by hand. Mostly,those newspapers disappeared inthe1960s. Someone would buy a computer to set type with, and a web offset press. You can't hardly print less than a thousand newspapers, because it takes a while to adjust the press. Offset printing made photography easier to use, and readers preferred groundwood paper to newsprint. Merchants liked reaching neighboring communities,and at the time, advertising paid 75% of the costs of operating a newspaper (it's about 90% now), so the owners of offset newspapers drove other weeklies out of business in less than a decade. I know of a few cases where one guy would buy up five or more weeklies,merging them into one, but it was for their job printing business.
And what became of their archives? They often consisted of inbound piles of newsprint on plank shelves, and they were torched along with that worthless flatbed press, and the building they were in. The linecasters were sold for little more than drayage costs, and battered hand-set type usually sold as scrap metal, the California job (type) cases sold to antique shops.
The only place you'll find those newspapers now is nailed up as insulation of p;d shacks and chicken houses, and between the fire marshals and the tax assessors, most of those are gone, too.
You're asserting that lack of evidence is evidence of lack, which is absurd.
Also, "Comics don't normally inject lines into the language" is specious. Of course they do. It's the popularizer who matters, not the coiner, and it has always been so. Comics are often popularizers. Sometimes the popularizer *is* the coiner, of course, but still: there must be popularizers (or more than one) for a word, catchphrase, or idiom to catch on.
If that's true, you ought to be able to come up with hundreds of examples in the last five or ten years where comics have brought phrases into widespread use, those phrases previously having been unfamiliar to the majority of the population. I say five or ten years so everyone here can remember. Can you come up with even five good examples?
DeaconB said: ...you ought to be able to come up with hundreds of examples in the last five or ten years where comics have brought phrases into widespread use, those phrases previously having been unfamiliar to the majority of the population. I say five or ten years so everyone here can remember. Can you come up with even five good examples?
Well, your question may have been directed to Grant, and some of these go beyond 5-10 years, but how about:
1. You kids get off my lawn! --David Letterman
2. Yada yada yada. --Jerry Seinfeld
3. The Devil made me do it. --Flip Wlson
4. Here come de judge. --Flip Wlson
5. You bet your sweet bippy. --Rowan & Martin
Between them, Rowan & Martin and "Get Smart" kept my generation supplied with a steady stream of catchphrases. Later, the early years of SNL were a rich source of more recent ones.
But if you're limiting it to just the last ten years, you're pretty much stuck with either "that's what she said" from "The Office", or the catchphrases of the Redneck Comedy bunch: "git 'er done", "here's your sign", "you might be a redneck"....
deaconB said
If that's true, you ought to be able to come up with hundreds of examples in the last five or ten years where comics have brought phrases into widespread use, those phrases previously having been unfamiliar to the majority of the population. I say five or ten years so everyone here can remember. Can you come up with even five good examples?
One program, Laugh In, stands out to me.
"You bet your bippy" (I see Heimhenge just mentioned this.), "Sock it to me","One ringy dingy","Verrrry interesting". There were many more. These come to my mind after 40 years.
Jerry Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
Mike Myers as various characters began many catchphrases. One that I use a lot still is, "Not!" This is said after something that you do not agree with.
Others from Mike Myers are, "Party on", "Talk amongst yourselves","Yeah, baby."
You may not want to count these because they are not from comedians but Clint Eastwood said,"Go ahead, make my day." Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "I'll be back." These are certainly not original (I'll be back?") But after these characters said them on the screen, they spread like wildfire. If you ask anyone, "who said,'I'll be back'" and say it with Arnold's accent, the inevitable answer is, "The Terminator." Same with Dirty Harry.
The Simpsons create their own words. The one that sticks with me is, "embiggen." And of course Homer said, "Doh!" This may not be original with Homer but it has spread so much since he said it I think it should be attributed.
These are 13 examples that just came from my memory. I'm sure there are many more. I know most of these are more that 5 or 10 years old, even the Simpsons is 25 years old, but most of them are so ingrained that I think most people know them.
Also, your statement, "You're asserting that lack of evidence is evidence of lack, which is absurd" is not being fair to Grant. He merely said that in order for your memories to be part of the etymology of that phrase there would need to be more evidence, preferably written.
deaconB, if there's no evidence, then there's no evidence. That's the way it is. In the word history game, we don't take anyone's word for anything. In fact, we double-check everything and doubt most of what we hear and read if there's no corroboration. We might, as Bill Safire used to do, quote high-ranking sources simply because they were high-ranking, but that doesn't mean they're the final word. He used to delight in taking the hot air out of a claim by some Washington insider.
Have you checked out Newspaperarchive.com? Or Proquest Historical Newspapers? Or what's left of Google News Archive? Or any of the British or Australian newspaper archives? They're loaded with small-town, small-run newspapers. It's not unheard of for such newspapers to survive, be digitized, and be used in etymological research. I have spent many thousands of hours poring through those sorts of pages.
This is an arbitrary and capricious request for proof: "you ought to be able to come up with hundreds of examples in the last five or ten years." Says who? And anyway, I said popularizers, not just comics who are popularizers. Rumsfeld: unknown unknowns. Bush: strategery. Simpsons: embiggen. Larry Craig: wide stance. Martha Stewart: it's a good thing. I could, indeed, come up with hundreds of examples.
By the way, I started in old-school newspapers in the late 1980s, right before the digital transition really caught, so a lot of what you wrote is bringing back memories. Compugraphics machines, Linotypes, huge photomechanical transfer machines, the smell of printer's ink and that hum of the big Goss-Urbanite press that could be felt throughout the whole building.
1. You kids get off my lawn! --David Letterman
Not new. It was familiar enough to be funny in 1962 when they filmed "To Kill A Mockingbird".
2. Yada yada yada. --Jerry Seinfeld
Not new. It was familiar enough to be funny when Meredith Willson wrote "Pick A Little" in the 1950s.
3. The Devil made me do it. --Flip Wlson
Not new. The insanity defense has been around since 1724, and it's never been popular. Flip's line was followed by the "Twinkie defense" and preceded by the joke that Kizzie Borden should be dealt with kindly because she was an orphan.
4. Here come de judge. --Flip Wlson
Not new. Derivative of the standard bailiff speech that starts "All Rise"
5. You bet your sweet bippy. --Rowan & Martin
Not new. "You bet your ass" was previously bowlderized by Groucho Marx as "You Bet Your Life" in 1950.
A comic cannot invent a new phrase because if you have to explain a joke, it ain't funny. They take something familiar and surprise the listener by throwing in some twist. Talking about a new show on the Cooking Network, "Now You're Cooking- with David Koresh" would by funny (as well as offensive) but only because "Now you're cooking with gas" is familiar.
ant Barrett said
deaconB, if there's no evidence, then there's no evidence. That's the way it is.
Whether there is evidence or not depends on what you want to allow as evidence. Social Security will allow a family bible as proof of age. The State of Indiana won't accept anything other than a birth certificate issued within two years of birth - but my father was born at home, and he didn't have a birth certificate until he was 23, when he wanted to marry.
Eye witness testimony is acceptable evidence in a criminal court proceeding, and that is the way it is,
Have you checked out Newspaperarchive.com? Or Proquest Historical Newspapers? Or what's left of Google News Archive? Or any of the British or Australian newspaper archives? They're loaded with small-town, small-run newspapers. It's not unheard of for such newspapers to survive, be digitized, and be used in etymological research. I have spent many thousands of hours poring through those sorts of pages.
NewspaperArchives.org has only 53 newspapers from Ohio; there are 88 counties. Paulding County, Ohio, had the Paulding Democrat, the Paulding Republican, The Oakwood News, The Grpver Hill News, the Payne Reflector, the Antwerp Bee, the Antwerp Argus and the Observer, all general circulation, and some others, issued by churches, utility companies, and other organizations. None of them are on NewspaperArchives.org When I explored writing a county history in the 1980s, I found that none of the archives existed, The county library, which is the oldest existing county Carnegie library, only has a couple of decades of the two surviving newspapers.
And the logical place to look would be in a towngas newspaper. The people heating their homes with towngas were the ones you'd be trying to sell ranges to. I checked with the natural gas companies, and they didn't have any archives predating the arrival of natural gas from the Southwest.
"J'ever see Paris?"
"No," said Oblio.
"J'ever see New Delhi?"
Oblio said, "No."
"Well, that's it. You sees what you wants to see and you don't see
what you don't wants to see."
- "The Point," Harry Nilsson
Ron Draney said
Between them, Rowan & Martin and "Get Smart" kept my generation supplied with a steady stream of catchphrases. Later, the early years of SNL were a rich source of more recent ones.But if you're limiting it to just the last ten years, you're pretty much stuck with either "that's what she said" from "The Office", or the catchphrases of the Redneck Comedy bunch: "git 'er done", "here's your sign", "you might be a redneck"....
I remember the "that's what she said" phrase and jokes starting around 1982 in the Tempe/Mesa/Phoenix area. The phrase was popular with folks I knew from young adults on up. It was also popular in the local pubs I frequented.
I despised the phrase; I first heard it from my then braggart boyfriend as he would spout it as the ending of one of his obnoxious stories. Thankfully, I decided not to marry him and I can now respond to the phrase with a smile.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
1 Guest(s)