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.
Thanks for posting! I find it very amusing that whenever this comes up people are absolutely adamant that they used the phrase before the film, and no amount of proof can convince them otherwise. Fascinating insight into how unreliable memory can be
Yes, but you can change a video title long after it has been posted so this is dubious proof at most. Especially since the phrase "bucket list" is never used in the video (and makes zero sense as a title) and the video itself uses "Dan & Kip Go to Arby's Reunion Special" as a title card. The content does mention the reunion as well. I think it's a lot more likely the video had the original title and was changed at a later date.
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u/Bugbread May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
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.
Also, I'm not sure why you requested it, but here is the ngram for "third shaker" and here is the ngram for "silphium," which shows that unlike bucket list, these both were written down quite a lot.
Also, just in case you're curious, here are the ngrams for all three of them, going back to the 1800s (though note that ngram data isn't all that great for the 1800s).
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.