the big picture (1926)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

>From Safire's "On Language" column today, regarding _The Big Picture: The
New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood_ by Edward Jay Epstein:

-----
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/magazine/13ONLANGUAGE.html

I pick no nits with his thesis of a paradigm-dropping shift in the
industry and its lingo, but one of his etymologies is speculative.
Blockbuster, he reports, was "coined in the 1920's to denote a movie whose
long line of customers could not be contained on a single city block."
Though an online encyclopedia suggests a similar origin -- describing a
play so successful that competing theaters on the block are "busted" -- no
specific citation is given, and without a citation, you don't have a
coinage you can bite on. I'd say blockbuster is World War II vintage and
cite The Los Angeles Times of July 30, 1942: "The R.A.F. had lost 29 of
the 600 bombers sent against Hamburg Sunday, when 175,000 incendiaries and
hundreds of explosive bombs, including two-ton 'block busters,' were
dumped in a 35-minute raid."

In that same year, the phrase the big picture had its premiere. In his
title, Epstein plays its movie meaning against its current sense of "an
overview that brings perspective." Probably (now I'm the one speculating)
the phrase grew out of the perspective in a painter's "broad canvas." The
Big Picture, with initial caps to signify a theme, was used in 1931 by a
Depression-era baseball official to describe the distinction that
sportswriters bestowed on the St. Louis Cardinals star Pepper Martin, but
its grand-perspective sense was first brought into play by Lt. Col. Robert
Allen Griffin, in defining the word strategy in 1942: "The term applies to
the big picture; it is used in direction of campaigns ... to win wars."
-----

I can't do better on "blockbuster" (ever-reliable Newspaperarchive has a
couple of hits dated as 1913, but they're actually from 1943).

But 1942 seems late for the 'overview' sense of "the big picture". Without
even hitting the newspaper databases, I find this 1926 cite on JSTOR:

-----
"Tendencies in the Foreign Trade of the United States" by E. Dana Durand
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 127,
(Sep. 1926), p. 21

All this will sound to a good many exporters both academic and idealistic.
But is that not because details obscure the big picture?
-----


--Ben Zimmer