I’m sure you’ve at least heard this phrase before, if not used it yourself, but do you know where it comes from?
I looked it up recently while I was writing a story for New Hampshire Public Radio about town meetings in tough economic times. In one voice track, I’d listed off some expensive budget items and called them, collectively, a wish list. My editor suggested I use the phrase “pies in the sky” instead.
Here’s the excerpt from the final script:
MULLEN: A full-time fire chief for the town of Ashland – 25-thousand dollars.
Two covered bridge reconstructions in Campton – 1-point-2 million dollars.
And a bigger, greener police station for Gilford – 1 –point- 6 million dollars.
Typical warrant articles in any other year…
But in the midst of an economic crisis, these items seem like pie in the sky to some voters.
I substituted the phrase, but realized that while I knew when and how to use this metaphor, I didn’t know its origin.
Enter “The Phrase Finder“, a co.uk website which, I’m sure, is one of many with a similar purpose. I found it by Googling “pie in the sky”.
In any case, here’s what comes up:
Pie in the sky
Meaning: A promise of heaven, while continuing to suffer in this life.
Origin: This is an American phrase and was coined by Joe Hill in 1911. Hill was a Swedish-born itinerant labourer who migrated to the USA in 1902. He was a leading light of the radical labour organisation The Industrial Workers of the World – known as the Wobblies, writing many radical songs for them. The phrase appeared first in Hill’s The Preacher and the Slave, which parodied the Salvation Army hymn In the Sweet Bye and Bye. The song, which criticized the Army’s theology and philosophy, specifically their concentration on the salvation of souls rather than the feeding of the hungry, was popular when first recorded and remained so for some years.
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:Chorus:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.The starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray
‘Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they’ll tell you when you’re on the bum:Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
They holler, they jump and they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all diseases today.
If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good,
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
The phrase wasn’t taken up until the Second World War, when it began to be used figuratively to refer to any prospect of future happiness which was unlikely ever to be realized.
Isn’t this great?! The site has interesting information on all sorts of these, even for obvious ones like “beat a dead horse” or “bite the bullet“, you can read about their earliest recorded uses in history. There have been many other times when I’ve found myself dropping phrases like these and wondering how they were coined. My mom knows a lot of them, saying her mother used to say all kinds of things like, “the bee’s knees”. The Phrase Finder’s hypothesis on that one is pretty neat:
The bee’s knees
Meaning: Excellent – the highest quality.
Origin: Hard to tell if we need an etymologist or an entomologist for this one.
Bees carry pollen back to the hive in sacks on their legs. It is tempting to explain this phrase as alluding to the concentrated goodness to be found around the bee’s knee. There’s no evidence for this explanation though. It is sometimes said to be a corruption of ‘business’, but there’s no evidence to support that either.
I am a great procrastinator, like many other writers and reporters I know, so this kind of website has the potential to sabotage my best laid plans to get things done on any given day. For example, I’ve been putting off writing a treatment for a screenplay I’m working on, and I keep allowing my technical ignorance stop me from even starting it. I’ll work myself into a tizzy, wishing it would write itself… a silver bullet solution.
Silver bullet
Meaning: A direct and effortless solution to a problem.
Origin: We now use the term ’silver bullet’ to refer to an action which cuts through complexity and provides an immediate solution to a problem. The allusion is to a miraculous fix, otherwise portrayed as ‘waving a magic wand’. This figurative use derives from the use of actual silver bullets and the widespread folk belief that they were the only way of killing werewolves or other supernatural beings.
The most famous user of silver bullets was of course the Lone Ranger. This cowboy series ran from 1933 on radio and later as a highly popular television show. Silver bullets fitted well with the masked hero’s miraculous persona. He typically arrived from nowhere, overcame evil and departed, leaving behind only a silver bullet and echoes of ‘who was that masked man?’.
Happy procrastinating!
