"Ya gotta love it!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Gov. Palin's exclamation of enthusiasm for a language that can produce
indispensible new words like "refudiate" was "Gotta celebrate it!"

That reminded me, of course, of the now widespread "(Ya) gotta love it!"
meaning, basically, "I love it!" or "It's great!"  (Very rarely spelled "You
got to love it!" and never, AFAIK and of course, "You've..." or "You
have...."

How long has this been around? My rough guess was about twenty years,
but that was considerably off.

A search of GB reveals an alleged (but necessarily suspect) 1953 ex. in
_Flying_ magazine. Snippet view only, Clyde!

The phrase seems to explode around 1972.  Of interest is that the earliest
exx. (most all with "Ya") tend to express a command rather than enthusiasm.
Made-up ex.: "How can you leap from perfectly good airplanes for fun?" "Ya
gotta love it!"  In other words, "One must be thoroughly dedicated to the
task or experience for its own sake."

Later usage, of course, is applied differently.

Certainly it should be in OED. But isn't.

JL


--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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