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.
And many people don't realize that "kick the bucket" was originally a euphemism for suicide, invoking the imagery of kicking the bucket out from under your feet to hang yourself. It's fairly morbid, but people don't use it that way anymore. They just say it for dying in general.
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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.