"I say it's spinach!"

Recently The New Yorker published a series of their cartoons from the 1930s.   The one embedded above struck a chord in my memory even though I'm not old enough to have lived then, so I must have encountered the line in some old book or movie.  When I researched it, I was delighted to discover that Wikipedia has an entire entry on this cartoon.

I say it's spinach (sometimes given in full as "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it" or further abbreviated to just "spinach") is a 20th-century American idiom with the approximate meaning of "nonsense" or "rubbish". It is usually spoken or written as an anapodoton, with only the first part of the complete phrase ("I say it's spinach") given to imply the second part, which is what is actually meant: "I say the hell with it."

(Broccoli was a relative novelty at that time, just then being widely introduced by Italian immigrant growers to the tables of East Coast cities)

"The spinach joke" quickly became one of the New Yorker cartoon captions to enter the vernacular (later examples include Peter Arno's "Back to the drawing board!" and Peter Steiner's "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"), becoming a bon mot of the 1930s, with continued, though diminishing, use into the early 21st century.

Irving Berlin's song "I Say It's Spinach (And the Hell with It)", which appeared in the 1932 musical Face the Music, used the full phrase: "Long as I'm yours, long as you're mine/Long as there's love and a moon to shine/I say it's spinach and the hell with it/The hell with it, that's all!" [YouTube here]

In Britain in the 19th century, "spinach" also meant "nonsense". This is presumably a coincidence, with an entirely different origin. Dickens uses the phrase "gammon and spinach" in this sense with Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield (published in 1849) saying "What a world of gammon and spinnage it is though, ain't it!" ("spinnage" being a now-obsolete variant of "spinach")

What a shame such a useful anapodoton has fallen out of favor.  TYWKIWDBI hereby proposes that the phrase be revived and re-entered into the common vernacular.  There are lots of times when one would like to say "bullshit"  or "hell with it," but circumstances render the expletives inappropriate.  So when you vehemently disagree with your boss, your grandmother, your clergy etc, just say "Spinach!"  If they ask what that means, you can truthfully say "It's an old term meaning 'nonsense'" without revealing the second part of the phrase.