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

[Laurence Horn]

I’ve always wondered what sliced bread was the greatest thing since.


> On May 21, 2018, at 8:07 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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