"That's no biggie"-- anachronism on "Mad Men"?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:37 AM,  <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
>
> If people were saying "biggie" for "big deal" in 1945, it seems to me pretty likely that they
> were negating it by 1960--and probably before.
>
> Would we expect a big time lag between "cool" and "not cool"? Should we expect a dictionary
> always to record both positive and negative forms?
>
> Even more to the point: if "That's a biggie" would not have been an anachronism in a script
> purporting to take place in the 1960s, is it justified to say that "That's no biggie" could be
> an anachronism--since it is just a simple grammatical extension of the nonnegated form? For
> someone in 1960 who had "That's a biggie" as a part of their [sic] vocabulary, "That's no
> biggie" would scarcely be noticeable, it seems to me.

Agreed. More anachronistic, it seems to me, was a mention of "the
military-industrial complex" in one of the early episodes of Season 1,
which takes place in 1960. Eisenhower didn't use the phrase until his
farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961. Granted, OED3 has a cite from 1953:

---
1953 Mil. Affairs 17 74/1 Shreveport was the heart of a
*military-industrial complex that extended west to Marshall, Texas,
and northwest to Jefferson, Texas.
---

But that's a bit different from DDE's prominent usage of "THE
military-industrial complex" (which goes unmentioned in the OED3 draft
entry for "military", even though it was the first cite given in
OED2). I doubt Madison Ave. ad men would have been throwing around
that expression before Eisenhower's famous speech.


--Ben Zimmer

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