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I've heard this expression a number of times, but I've never really understood what it was supposed to mean.
It's usually used to indicate (sarcastically) that something is a tragedy. Most recently, I was telling a friend (in email) that it was such a nice evening I'd planned to sit on the deck to do my Spanish homework but discovered that I'd left it at work so instead I grabbed the novel I've been reading and a glass of wine and spent the evening reading.
He responded with, "Oh, the humanity..." (in quotes) followed by a >:->
Where does the expression come from? Why "humanity"? It kind of has the feel of a pop-culture reference but I feel like I'm completely missing the connection.
ArteNow
My guess is that is was popularized by the Herbert Morrison report on the Hindenburg disaster in which he cries out "Oh, the humanity."
I believe it originally comes from “Bartleby, the Scrivener†(1853), a short story by Herman Melville. At least I think this is the original line, and not a reference to another older line. The last words are:
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
So I guess it is “pop culture,†as all literary references hearken back to a popular culture of one time, if not our own.
I think you'll find that the famous 1937 video of the Hindenberg disaster had something to do with spreading the term, as well as, much later, pop-culture riffs on it on The Simpsons by the character Kent Brockman.
I edited and added my bit about the Hindenburg around the same time as your post, so I think our words crossed. Sorry.
Of course, you are right, Grant. Seinfeld, in which the line is spoken by Newman as his appropriated mail truck transporting fish caught on fire, kept the line alive. But the Simpsons, probably has more to do with today's users of the phrase than anything.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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