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.
As a mom of two young kids, I will be using this! It'll help at work, which has been increasingly full of spinach lately.
ReplyDeleteThat cartoon has always had a special place in my mental gallery. Right next to the one where a small dissatisfied/defiant-looking boy is towered over by his enormous mother and father, also at the dinner table. The father, a coarse-looking working man in his undershirt, says, eyebrows arched up, "An' what's wrong wit' broccoli, if I ain't bein' too inquisitive?"
ReplyDeleteRegarding anapadoton, I'm thinking of a phrase common enough when I was a little boy: /The hell?/ which stood for "What the hell is going on here?" or "What the hell happened?" or "What the hell is the matter with you?" I'm not sure that applies, but it seems to.
closely related: "dafuq?"
DeleteI like the class dimension, though it's a bit off topic. George Walker Bush hated broccoli and I can imagine him as a child at this sort of table. At my childhood dinner table there were ten kids; "not liking" something was simply not recognized as a thing. Working class.
ReplyDeleteMy mother said back then “The only thing I have I common with Bush is I don’t like Brocolli “
DeleteI grew up in my grandparents' Italian restaurant. When I was eight my mother married Roland, who had two boys and a girl, all older than I, and we moved to Fresno, where Roland was a road salesman in a Ford Galaxie 500 for Sunshine Biscuit company (Hydrox, Vienna Fingers, Golden Fruit Biscuits, Lemon Coolers), and the dinner food abruptly changed from spaghetti and meatballs and perfect hard garlic bread and crisp iceberg lettuce salad and real pizza, sausage sandwiches, sometimes pork chops, or veal, or ravioli, frozen blueberries in sugar sauce, and spumoni ice cream --all good, normal food-- to weird single-dad food that Roland and his kids liked, that was normal to them, like, uh... My mother matter-of-factly put this runny bean soup on the table, that looked and tasted spoiled, like it was sewage. Everybody else ate. I tasted it, said, "What is this." It's beans. It's good. I said, "May I be excused?" My mother said, "There are children starving in India who would love to have dinner but they can't. You will sit there until you clean that plate." Okay, I understood. I would sit there forever. I said, "Can I get my book?" No. They all finished, got up, washed their dishes, went to the other room to watch teevee. I sat at the table for an hour or two, listening to the teevee, counting things around me in the room, daydreaming, planning the conversations that would happen depending on who came back through here first. I tasted the soup again a few times. Equally vile every time. Eventually my mother came back in, looked at me, picked up the soup, said quietly, close to my ear, "You don't have to eat this," and spilled it down the drain in the sink, which surprised the heck out of me; it had been impressed upon me to /never waste food/ (another story, another time). Some kinds of beans are okay in salad or in a burrito or a chili dog, or just chili if you're really hungry and you have soda crackers to crumble on it, but even today almost sixty years later if I'm somewhere they have sludgy soup with that repulsive flesh-colored maggot-like kind of beans in it, I'm right back there in Fresno, in that dim house with so many people breathing in it at night. She was on my side about the food and in many other ways. It was a good kind of conspiracy whose internal benefits lasted all my life. It made me a better teacher. I say it's sewage and I say the hell with it. Damn straight.
ReplyDeleteLoved reading this. Brilliant.
DeleteOh, I so miss Hydrox. They were the cookie of my childhood and Oreos are not even close. The ersatz Hydrox they now sell at Cracker Barrel are close, but even they are not the same.
DeleteThe caption was written by E. B. White and was originally printed with the lines transposed, which led to the abandonment of the whole two-line-caption trope.
ReplyDeleteThe transposed version (broccoli being the second line) is funnier!
DeleteIt *is* spinach and to hell with it!
ReplyDelete