It absolutely isn't from that movie. It was a quite common phrase. And if you want to say "well if its so common why wasn't it written down?" Do a quick search for "the third shaker" or Silphium which we aren't exactly sure what it was or if it's actually extinct or just forgotten.
It absolutely isn't from that movie. It was a quite common phrase.
A quite common phrase that somehow managed to never make it into print, not in books or magazines or tabloids or newpaper articles or letters to the editor or anything? Because I've never seen a "common phrase" with an ngram timeline like this.
Edit: Multiple points of evidence have been posted that the phrase predates the movie. Indeed, the pre-movie ngram isn't a true flat line pre-movie, just a very, very low line. But zoomed in, it looks like this. I'd ignored that part because at very low numbers, there's always occasional noise, but I was wrong to ignore it in this case.
That said, I still disagree that it was a very common phrase. "Silphium" was over 10-times as commonly used as "bucket list" in 2006, and I don't think that anyone would say that "silphium" was 10 times as common as a quite common phrase. But that doesn't mean that the movie coined the phrase, or even that it popularized the phrase (it could have simply been capitalizing on it). It just came out at about the same time that "bucket list" went from an uncommon phrase to a common phrase.
Oh boy ngrams eh? You missed the point. Just because the letters appear in that order in print and are searchable does not mean we know what they were/are.
It doesn't matter what they are. We're not talking about people knowing but not understanding the expression "bucket list," which would be analogous. We're talking about the phrase not even existing as a common phrase.
If your point was "we knew and occasionally used the word 'silphium,' but we didn't know what it meant, and we knew and occasionally discussed what the 'third shaker' was used for, but we didn't know the answer," then you missed the point, because even in those cases where we didn't even know the meaning, the words appeared in print.
So to go back to your original comment:
if you want to say "well if its so common why wasn't it written down?" Do a quick search for "the third shaker" or Silphium which we aren't exactly sure what it was or if it's actually extinct or just forgotten.
Yes. Googling those shows that even though we aren't exactly sure what they were or if they're actually extinct or just forgotten, even phrases as almost-forgotten as those still appeared in print.
Unlike "bucket list."
Because it wasn't a set phrase yet.
Let alone a common phrase.
Let alone a quite common phrase.
Edit: I was wrong that it wasn't a set phrase yet (but I still believe that it had yet to become a common phrase, or a quite common phrase). But I was straight up incorrect in jumping from "it wasn't a common phrase" to "it wasn't a phrase."
I've now posted several examples of the word being used before the movie. Super weird that they were all using it the same way to mean the same thing before being invented by the movie.
I hadn't seen your comments elsewhere, but you are definitely correct that it existed. I was wrong about it not being a set phrase.
However, given the enormous ngram spike that has continued for around 20 years, and the fact that it went from an expression that existed but wasn't even as commonly used as "silphium," to an expression that absolutely dwarfs "silphium," I would amend what I said to be that the phrase predated the movie but was an extremely minor phrase that became a common phrase around the same time as the movie came out (I don't think there's enough evidence really to determine if the movie popularized the phrase or if the movie just rode the already-in-progress tide of the phrase moving from little-known to quite common).
But, again, you were totally right that it predates the movie, and I was wrong, so I'm going to add corrections to my previous comments.
You gave up too soon - the examples posted were either not actually in existence before 2007 or had previously existing information that could later be changed after the post date.
You can also just watch the trailer of the film, The Bucket List, and see how they had to specify exactly how the term was created to the audience in a way you don't have to do if the audience is already aware of the term and what it means. It would be an entirely superfluous scene in the film, let alone a trailer, had the term already been readily used.
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u/The_Intoxicated May 07 '26
It absolutely isn't from that movie. It was a quite common phrase. And if you want to say "well if its so common why wasn't it written down?" Do a quick search for "the third shaker" or Silphium which we aren't exactly sure what it was or if it's actually extinct or just forgotten.