[Ads-l] "one-hit wonder" redux

[Baker, John]

The OED entry has a bracketed quote from a baseball use from 1956.  However, “one-hit wonder” seems to have been a persistent, if never common, usage in the baseball context.  The earliest I see is the headline, “One-Hit Wonder Fails To Hold Locals Down,” from the Middletown (N.Y.) Daily Times Press (July 3, 1914) (NewspaperArchive).


John Baker


From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On Behalf Of Ben Zimmer
Sent: Saturday, September 19, 2020 11:58 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "one-hit wonder" redux

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Back in 2011, Garson O'Toole provided an antedating for "one-hit wonder" in
a musical context, taking it back to Dec. 27, 1958:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-March/107877.html<http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-March/107877.html>

The cite, which is now in OED3, is from an Ottawa Citizen column by radio
broadcaster Gord Atkinson. But Atkinson was quoting his own predictions he
had given in a column at the beginning of the year, so the date to beat is
actually Jan. 4, 1958.

---
1958 _Ottawa Citizen_ 4 Jan. 24/6 Several one-hit wonders of the old year,
will vanish into shellac obscurity.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/59566951/one-hit-wonders/<https://www.newspapers.com/clip/59566951/one-hit-wonders>
---

The phrase also appeared a few months later in Variety, in a review of the
album "Who's Sorry Now" by Connie Francis:

---
1958 _Variety_ 28 May 54/5 [ProQuest] This young songstress, who made the
bestselling grade with the title song of this set, shapes up an authentic
stylist rather than a "one-hit" wonder.
---

Notably, both of these examples predate the introduction of Billboard's Hot
100 chart in Aug. '58.

--bgz

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