Negative Nancies and other related musings

[Victor Steinbok]

Negative Nancies made the WaPo today--it has already been in The New
Republic ( http://bit.ly/dp1rRe ) since January.

http://bit.ly/9hNz4p
> Various Negative Nancys spent Thursday puzzling over what ABC News was
> thinking by hiring someone outside the box, with little knowledge of
> domestic politics, to anchor "This Week." Amanpour, who grew up in
> Iran and Britain, the daughter of an Iranian father and a British
> mother, will be the first broadcast TV Sunday Beltway show anchor with
> a distinctly non-American accent, they said. Some suggested the
> decision was foisted upon the news division by its Disneyland bosses
> (ABC is owned by Disney).

[I included the whole graf for other language-related bits.]


UD has "Negative Nancies" going back to 2003. Wiktionary has it back to
2001. UD also has Nosy Nancy, but neither has Nosy Nellie or Negative
Nellie. I tried several searches, but the most realistic result I got
was {Negative-Nancies | Negative-Nancy}, which gave me about 43000 raw
ghits. Doing the two separately gave over a million for one and over
half a million for the other--which is just unrealistic. [I just re-ran
the paired search and got 44500, then put in quotation marks for each
and got 45700] There are 16 current news hits, including Salon, Daily
Newarker (NJ) and a bunch of blogs, but neither WaPo nor The New
Republic show up.

GNA is another matter. The earliest legitimate hit is from the Richmond
Times - Dispatch (Jul 29, 1994--in PQ)
IT'S YOUR ATTITUDE AND YOUR LIFE
> But before you decide to be a positive person or what she calls a
> Negative Nancy, you should know that other people can feel your energy.

The earliest readable copy of the phrase turns out to be the name of a
goth band, which signifies something about the distribution of the
phrase, but does not attest to it directly.
http://bit.ly/cNo1Bi

Of course, it also shows up on South Park (apparently, Season 6 Episode
8, June 26, 2002).

http://bit.ly/dvAq1R
> Cartman: Okay Kyle, you're being a Negative Nancy. Stop it. Okay
> unless you wan't everyone to call you Negative Nancy from now on.

The earliest GB hits are from 2001: http://bit.ly/cZgCVK

I've never heard "Negative Nellie" but it's widely attested. On the
other hand "Nos(e)y Nellie" is quite common.

Another expression that belongs to the same category is "Grumpy Gus". GB
list one hit to 1969 and it matches the record on Amazon--Bible 2.0,
CreateSpace (April 20, 1969). But the title is decidedly 2000s and the
typesetting suggest capability generally not available in 1969--maybe
1996. It also has other fine folklorisms, such as "Monkeys will fly out
of your ass", which otherwise dates to 1999.
http://bit.ly/cS1mnw
http://bit.ly/bBXKmr

[Interestingly, the earliest hit for the latter expression is from 1990
but substitutes "ears" for "ass": Denver Post, Nov 11, 1990: "Monkeys
will fly out of my ears before the Nuggets win this game." Two years
later, Wayne's World made the phrase popular with "butt". Other versions
include "pants", "nose", "column", "[buttocks]", "a--", "tail pipe",
"bodily orifices", "hind-quarter", "hiney", "... well, you get the idea"
and "Strunk and White". No, I am not kidding-- http://bit.ly/9tfAuF But
my favorite is, '"Flaming monkeys will sooner fly out of my [synonym for
buttocks]," Hickey said. This sounded pretty definitive.']

     VS-)

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