"Doom and Gloom"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005 13:40:47 -0400, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>Oxford University Press reference works vary in quality from the
>magnificent (like the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary
>of American Legal Quotations) to the less magnificent, so one is often
>unsure of where in the spectrum a given new book lands.  I am looking at
>the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, s.v. "doom and gloom," and see the
>following:
>
>"This expression, sometimes found as _gloom and doom_, was particularly
>pertinent to fears about a nuclear holocaust during the cold war period
>of the 1950s and 1960s.  It became a catchphrase in the 1968 film
>_Finian's Rainbow_."
>
>I doesn't see anything about "gloom and doom" in the "memorable
>quotations" listed for this film by Internet Movie Database.  Can anyone
>supply any information about how this phrase was used in "Finian's
>Rainbow"  and how it became a catchphrase?

The OED has this from the script of the musical:

-----
1947 HARBURG & SAIDY Finian's Rainbow I. ii. 32 Doom and gloom... D-o-o-m
and gl-o-o-m! Ibid. II. iv. 131, I told you that gold could only bring you
doom and gloom, gloom and doom.
-----

Yet another Oxonian reference, _The Oxford Dictionary of New Words_, gives
a bit more information:

-----
gloom and doom
noun phrase
Also in the form doom and gloom (Business World)(Politics)
A feeling or expression of despondency about the future; a grim
prospect, especially in political or financial affairs.

Etymology:  A quotation from the musical Finian's Rainbow (1947,
turned into a film in 1968), in which Og the pessimistic
leprechaun uses the rhyming phrase as a repeated exclamation:

Doom and gloom...D-o-o-m and gl-o-o-m...I told you that
gold could only bring you doom and gloom, gloom and
doom.

History and Usage:  This allusive phrase was first picked up by
US political commentators in the sixties (perhaps as a result of
the popularity of Finian's Rainbow as a film) and was being used
as an attributive phrase to describe any worrying or negative
forecast by the seventies. In the early eighties it was perhaps
particularly associated with economic forecasting and with the
disarmament debate; the emphasis shifted in the second half of
the eighties to the pessimistic forecasts of some
environmentalists about the future of the planet. Both the
nuclear and environmental uses influenced the formation of the
word doomwatch (originally the name of a BBC television series)
for any systematic observation of the planet designed to help
avert its destruction.  A person who makes a forecast of gloom
and doom is a gloom-and-doomster.
-----

(This is a fair-use excerpt taken from a decidedly unfair-use source: the
text of the book as it appears in a Russian "Full-text Internet Library"
<http://weblib.wl.dvgu.ru/books/oxfrd_nw.gz>.  I've seen similar full-text
sites from .ru -- is this sort of copyright infringement not considered
actionable in Russia?)

Anyway, the doom/gloom combo actually began appearing in US political
discourse in the '50s, not the '60s.  For instance, a front-page story in
the Aug. 20, 1954 _New York Times_ gives details of a speech by Pres.
Eisenhower at the Illinois State Fair, where he ridiculed Democrats as
"prophets of gloom and doom."  (Oddly enough, William Safire has
misattributed that phrase to Adlai Stevenson in several columns.)
Eisenhower might have been inspired by _Finian's Rainbow_, but the
"prophets" formulation appeared well before the opening of the musical:

-----
_New York Times Magazine_ Jan. 22, 1939, p. 14, col. 4
Is the situation, after all, as bad as the prophets of gloom and doom
would have us believe?
("All Is Not Lost In The Fight For Democracy," by David S. Muzzey,
Professor of American History, Columbia University)
-----

The combinations of "doom and gloom" and "gloom and doom" both go back to
the 1890s on Proquest.


--Ben Zimmer