"Thanks! I Needed That!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

To Victor: if it was idiomatic by 1953, I think we'd have seen a precise ex.
("Thanks! Ineeded that!") long before ca1970.  Though they come close,
neither Gann nor Uris use the cliche phrase.

The coincidence suggests hypotherically that both were inspired by something
earlier.  But if it had been too well known, neither would have been likely
to use it in a serious (if inadvertently ridiculous) context.

"Thanks! I needed that!" sounds like a parody of something - and certainly
the Skin Bracer ads were parodying something - presumably one or both of
these scenes.

At the moment, it looks like Mennen effectively originated the precise
phrase. It may have been uttered earlier by people describing the screen
moments, but so far there's no evidence that it was sufficiently common to
be considered a "proverb" before ca1970.

I'm distinguishing carefully between the  novelistic/screen action, the
novelistic/screen dialogue, and the precise, allusive phrase.

JL
On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 5:58 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Thanks! I Needed That!"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  Is it incredible or does it suggest that the expression was already
> idiomatic at this point?
>
>     VS-)
>
> On 8/24/2010 2:20 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> > Great work, Garson.
> >
> > Incredible that two novels, both published early in 1953 (Uris's by
> > Putnam and Gann's by Sloane), contain similar melodramatic scenes.
> >
> > JL
>
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