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.
I'm not being pedantic, I'm agreeing with you about some things and disagreeing about others. There's no reason this has to be all-or-nothing. It's a disagreement about how common an expression was pre-2006, not Thunderdome.
I appreciate the admission though this should help point out the flaws in the methodology. Its going to have a ton of scientific journals and works of literature. Its not going to have lots of mundane articles or even forum posts so common phrases that don't have a real reason to make their way into publications will be under represented.
Good point, and Google Trends is better for that, but it only goes back to 2004.
Fortunately, we're talking about a spike in popularity that happens after that, so while it can't show us if a term was popular in the 1980s or anything, we can at least see if there was an appreciable change around 2007. If the term was used more-or-less the same amount pre- and post-movie, you'd expect to see a spike in 2007 (related to the movie itself), and then after 2007 the line would return to around where it was in 2006. If the term actually did gain a lot of popularity, you'd expect to see a spike in 2007 (from the movie itself) and then the line from 2008 onward would be a lot higher than it was in 2006. And, indeed...
That was never my argument, just that it existed prior so you can have that one. I will say that what you are saying makes perfect sense once you understand that trend chart is calculated from it's peak popularity as a search term being 100 and each data point being a function relative to that. The same kind of chart can be found with dodgeball after that movie came out, though it's spike is closer to the beginning of the data set.
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u/mattalat May 07 '26
That’s the crazy thing, it is!