Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

It seems there should be some stories about infants being shipped with turnips, except no, there is nothing.

Off one's trolley (more English than American) is  probably from the idea that the trolley car  follows a proper path along its rail.

Off one's rocker  similarly harks to mechanical element that controls the motions  of machinery.

Johnny Carson used the phrase often, and if one of his writers didn't coin it, he surely popularized it.

Thee were a lot of 20th-century immigrans from Eastern Europe.  mostly, they ere rural agricultural workers, and root crops like rutanagas, parsnips, turnips and beets take a lot of hard labor.  (Taters and carrots tend not to grow well except in sandy soil, so they are less of a PITA.

We mostly had "beet hunkies" in NW Ohio.  Beets have seeds that stick together, so there was a loot of stoop labor in "cubing beets", which is not the same thing as dicing beets, but rather going through and chopping out all but one stem, so you end up with one huge sugar best instead of a bunch of little one.  Digging beets is heavy clay soil was hard, and the beets were pretty heavy to hoist into the wagon.  (At the beet factory, the beets were dumped on the ground at harvest season and when they factory was ready for them, they were floated through a spiderweb of trenches.)

The last of the beet hunkies arrived with the Hungarian Revolution.  They were not familiar with the ways of the new land, and spoke broken English, but they were hard workers and looked pretty much like everyone else, so they soon were intermarried with earlier waves of immigrants. The only real anti-immigrant sentiment I recall hearing is a man complaining that his son's name was spelled Stephen, not Steven, like those illiterate hunkies.  An entire family would live in a "hunkie wagon", which was a 4x8 box, 8 feet tall, of 3/4" plywood, on a wagon chassis, a wood stove, no plumbing.  Our chickens had better accommodations.

About the only culinary influence I can attribute to them is "hunky stew" which was basically chili macaroni.  They tended to eat a lot of rutabagas and turnips, which aren't too prevalent in restaurant food, and parsnips, which many people eat without realizing it; they just think they are eating particularly sweet, nice-flavored potatoes if they are diced up.

My uncle, captured in the Battler of the Bulge, was sent to a POW camp in Poland.  He and other POWs spent many days filling burlap bags with root vegetables and loading them onto rail cars.  He said that the guards were not particularly unkind, and they ate the same foods, in the same quantities, although it wasn't much, and the soldiers, who just carried a rifle, fared better than prisoners doing hard labor.  Some POWs died of starvation, but the last couple of days, when the allies freed the concentration camp down the road, the internees started walking past, and the POWs were appalled at how thin they were, like walking skeletons.

So anyhow, I think the expression came from the experiences in dealing with Eastern European immigrants, and turnips rather than beet or rutabaga because turnip truck is alliterative.

If one is around the bend, is it necessary to be off the trolley?  Trolleys, BTW, did not necessarily run on railroad tracks.  Mass transit typically started out as horse-drawn trolleys without tracks.  Jitney wagons were also called trolleys.  High-toned restaurants often have dessert trolleys.  I think the essence is that a trolley is of light construction and intended for local cartage, although "light" is relative.  A miner's trolley hauls heavy ore, but was light enough to be propelled by miners instead of a locomotive.

Ngrams Viewer is persnickety at times.  If you look a little harder, you can find earlier examples than 1981.  And I believe Tonight Show episodes aren't indexed.

David Ahl's "More Basic Computer Games Volume 2" in 1980 had

578 PRINT "HEY, I DION'T JUST FALL OFF A TURNIP TRUCK, YA KNON"""

embedded in the code.  And there's a hit on Kissinger's 1969 book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, although apparently Dr. Kissinger doesn't want excerpts shown.

In January 1976, Cruising World magazine write 

"Man, what are you talking about?" "Your singlehanded non-stop twice-around circumnavigation. What's your route?” He belched loudly in my face. ”Sport, you must be out of your cotton-pickin' mind! You must have just fallen off a turnip truck.

In 1978, Leonard Wise wrote in the Diggstown Ringers:

My boy Robby ain't just some joker who came down the pike and fell off the back of a turnip truck, you know." Leon Willet found this exceptionally funny and laughed aloud. Gillon showed his appreciation by rubbing the young lawyer's curly 90.

What's a "curly 90"?  Maybe 90 is the page number and "hairs" was on the next page?

In 1979, in The Truth about Peter Harley, James Mills wrote:

Nostrand said one of them was dressed in a linen suit, "sort of a young-FSO-on-the-make uniform," and the other one 'looked like he'd just fallen off the back of a turnip truck." The man who came to my door must have been the second one.