Beech Tree News Network

Against The Grain by: Andy Sullivan

Some of the most popular, most used phrases are fixtures in the vocabulary of us all.  We’ve all heard “to err is human; to forgive is divine.  Although, we mostly shorten it to “to err is human”.  Where does it originate? This phrase makes sense of the notion that the originator, the English poet Alexander Pope, was trying to convey.  In the poem An Essay on Criticism, Part II, Pope explains that while anyone can make a mistake, we should aspire to do as God does, that is, show mercy and forgive sinners.  Ah ne'er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast,
Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!
Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.  Note that he used the word humane instead of human, as we say today.  The reason is that humane was the accepted spelling of human in the 18^th century. 

'A piece of the action' has an unambiguously American flavour. It brings to mind images of gangster movies with Jimmy Cagney and the like demanding 'hey, gimme a pieca da action'. When the Star Trek franchise opted for a mobster-themed episode in 1968 they called it 'A Piece of the Action'. However, it isn't essentially a US phrase and tracing its genesis takes us well outside the USA and into a history of finance.

In the early 1600s, the Dutch came upon an interesting trading innovation - the company. Until then, the spice trade had been profitable but small scale, with spices being brought back from 'the Indies' (broadly what we now call Asia) along the tortuous Spice Road on pack horses. The high price of spices encouraged entrepreneurs to build ships to transport them in larger quantities. There was big money to be made, but the large capital cost of building a fleet and the threat of theft by pirates made it too risky a venture for an individual investor, so in 1602 the Dutch East India Company was formed.

Generals and political leaders have argued over the costs of the military since Adam was a lad. Their conversations have probably not changed much:

General: "Caesar/My Liege/Mr President, we need more triremes/cannons/nuclear weapons."
Emperor/King/President: "The people need more olives/bread/iPads. Can't you manage with what you've got?

Dwight D. Eisenhower faced something of a dilemma in 1953. He was a military man to his socks and was inclined to augment defence in the face of the perceived 'reds under the bed' threat, but he was also a Republican US president and as such politically wedded to cutting state spending. His solution was simple - increase the armed forces but decrease their budget. In ordinary circumstances that circle would be difficult to square. The solution that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff came up with, which they titled the 'New Look', was a policy of using nuclear weapons in any conflict bigger than what they called 'a brush-fire war'. That allowed them to radically reduce the numbers of servicemen and replace them with the comparatively inexpensive atomic bombs.

All of the above was described in a story in The Winona Republican Herald on 21st December 1953. The story also reports Admiral Arthur Radford as describing the policy as the 'more bang for your buck' theory. This was reputed to be an adaptation of Pepsi-Cola's 'More Bounce to the Ounce' slogan, which was introduced in 1950.

Most sources credit US Defense Secretary Charles Wilson as the source of the expression 'more bang for your buck'. These invariably point to him having used the phrase in 1953. However, Wilson wasn't the person who coined the phrase, although its increased use in a military context during the time of the Eisenhower administration did bring the expression to wider use.

The first citation of the phrase in print that I can find is an advert in Metals and Plastics Publications, 1940. No advertiser would use a colloquial expression in an advert unless it was understandable to his audience, so I expect there are earlier citations yet to be found. 

'More bang for your buck' has now lost its nuclear associations, as has the alternative, less widely used form that emerged around the same time - 'a bigger bang for your buck'.  (www.phrases.org.uk/meaning)

I’ve got more to share but that’s for later.  I believe I might go for southern sayings next.