The admonition Don’t Mess with Texas may sound like a tough guy’s warning, but it started out as an anti-littering slogan more than 40 years ago. In the 1980s, the Texas Department of Transportation launched the campaign to cut roadside litter that was costing taxpayers about $20,000,000 a year to clean up. Within five years, litter on highways was reportedly reduced by 72%. Eli Burnstein shares this and other surprising stories about familiar sayings in Phrased and Confused: the Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations. (Bookshop|Amazon) This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “How “Don’t Mess with Texas” Helped Cut Highway Litter by 72 Percent”
Well, Grant, we’ve all heard the expression don’t mess with Texas, right?
You see it on bumper stickers and belt buckles or political speeches.
You hear it all the time, right?
Mhmm.
Yeah.
Even now, it’s for for a long time, right?
Yeah.
And it’s easy to assume that it’s some kind of tough guy catch phrase.
But you mentioned that it’s been around for a long time, and the fact is that it’s been around for more than forty years, and it started out as a slogan to get people to stop littering because back in the nineteen eighties, the Texas Department of Transportation was trying to stop roadside littering, which was costing taxpayers something like $20,000,000 a year to clean up.
And so they started this campaign called Don’t Mess With Texas.
And supposedly within five years, they’d reduced litter on the highways by 72.
And I learned this from the new book, Phrased and The Curious Meaning of Timeless Quotations.
It’s by Ellie Bernstein.
We will link to that book on the website, and you’re free to mess with us.
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