A listener in Brazil wants to know about the source of the phrase keeping up with the Joneses, which refers to trying to compete with others in terms of possessions and social status. This expression was popularized by a comic strip with the same name drawn by newspaper cartoonist Arthur “Pop” Momand in the early 20th century. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Keeping Up with the Joneses”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, Grant. Hey, Martha. This is Doug Douglas. I’m from Brazil.
Doug, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Where in Brazil are you?
Deep south, next to Uruguay.
I’m a teacher of English here in Brazil, and so I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve my language skills.
A couple weeks ago, I was studying idioms, and I came across this idiom that sounded kind of funny because it reminded me of a famous or infamous reality TV show.
The sentence was, my sisters just bought a new car.
Basically, it’s just keeping up with the Joneses.
I immediately thought of the TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
I don’t know if you know.
And so my questions are, who are the Joneses? And are they also a family? And if so, why would anyone want to keep up with them?
All right.
So keeping up with the Joneses.
Yeah, that’s a common expression in English.
And we suspect that it goes back to an old comic strip from the early 1900s that was called Keeping Up with the Joneses.
The guy who did the comic strip was Arthur Momond.
He went by the nickname Pop.
So his nickname was Pop Momond.
And it was about a family.
And they mentioned the Joneses, but you never saw them in the cartoon.
They would make references to them.
And this was a—
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
So the Joneses were a family that were well off, and they were always acquiring new things.
And, you know, the wife would give the husband a hard time about not making more money and, you know, not as much as the Joneses.
And in fact, Douglas, you can go on Google Books and find a whole book of those cartoons.
They’re really corny.
They’re really silly.
I definitely will.
So I really wanted to look into that to see what it is about.
Yeah, check it out.
And I’m curious, is there a similar phrase in Portuguese or something that conveys the same idea?
Not really.
No, I was raking my mind trying to come up with something that was similar to that.
I couldn’t find anything.
Interesting.
Douglas, I wanted to toss something in there for some perspective.
It’s important to remember that during the 28 years that this comic strip ran, that comics were huge.
They were a really important part of the cultural fabric of the United States at the time.
There were whole big sections of the newspapers, and the comics were large.
Like, you bought newspapers mainly for the comics sometimes, but you might choose out a particular publisher just because you liked the strips that they ran.
So they had a lot of influence, and we have numerous examples of comics influencing language.
And so it’s not unusual at all for Keeping Up with the Joneses to have spread into American language and still be a thing.
That’s great.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
I really appreciate it.
And I’m going to look into these comic strips.
Hopefully I’ll find some.
Excellent.
Ciao, ciao.
Ciao, ciao.
Bye-bye.
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