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

[Wilson Gray]

Geez, Ben! I thought that you were going to CC me, every time that you
came cross the name off my birthplace in print!

That's Marshall, Texas, of course. Jefferson is merely the last stop
made by The Sunshine Special and The Texas Eagle before they reached
Marshall, on the way from Sa'nt Louis to San Antone.

You know, each of these trains has at least one song written about it.
Yet, none mentions my birthplace. Can you believe it?!

-Wilson, arsing about

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:59 AM, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "That's no biggie"-- anachronism on "Mad Men"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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