[Ads-l] "the greatest thing to happen to TV since sliced bread"

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Tue May 22 00:07:23 UTC 2018


Specifically, "the remote control is the greatest thing to happen to TV
since sliced bread".
>From a commercial for something or other, heard, in part, this evening.
I had forgotten that sliced bread had once happened to TV.  I looked it up,
and it was in 1953, but my family didn't get a TV until 1954.
Those of you learned in the study of language will no doubt have a word for
this sort of utterance.  I call it muddled speech (alluding to an
unavoidable TV commercial of 1954). *

​GAT​

* Doctors call it "Iron Deficiency Anemia".  We call it "tired blood".

-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
picture of his great-grandfather.)
http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/james-gillray/an-excrescence---a-fungus-alias-a-toadstool-upon-a-dunghill/3851

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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