“Cry Me a River” is a great, great song – and a great retort to someone trolling for sympathy. Did the phrase come after the song, or was the song based on a phrase that people already used?
Is there any chance at all that the phrase emerged as a pun on ‘Crimea’ the place?? I don’t think there’s a real Crimea River, but it’s a decent pun nonetheless I think.
Unless the song you refer to is not the Justin Timberlake version, but was instead made way before I was born, the phrase came first. It’s a fairly common expression, I thought.
Purely an unsubstantiated opinion here: the expression came first. So many novelty songs, many C&W songs and old folk songs like “Jimmy Crack Corn” have to have been based on existing sayings or expressions.
“But Not For Me” is an interesting example of taking a common phrase and punning on it with “Knot for me” as a closing thought.
There may be some vice-versa cases, where a song introduces a phrase that becomes a catchy slang expression. And perhaps things like “Mairzy Doats” comprise a real dilemma as to which came first.
But “Cry Me A River” seems to me to be too easily said as a putdown in common speech not to have been around before the song.
BTW, may favorite rendition is Julie London’s. All others are measured against that one.
So, um, obviously there were earlier versions and I feel dumb. One website said “Cry Me A River. Words & Music by Arthur Hamilton, 1953”. We now just need to find instances before '53.
What got me thinking about it was listening to my most recent mix CD – I put on two versions, back to back: Joe Cocker’s 90 MPH one, followed by Caetano Veloso’s very very sultry one.
BTW, the song was written in 1955 – my mind can’t wrap around the idea of Justin Timberlake doing it, so I’m going to pretend nothing was said about that.
Aha, different song with the same title – phew.
Justin Timberlake’s song isn’t the same song as the one made popular by Julie London. Titles aren’t copyrightable so you can have different books, movies, songs, etc. on occasion that have the same title even though they’re completely different.
Ahem…sorry, twickster. Somehow I overlooked the post where you noticed they were different songs.
I can’t find any use of the phrase in a put down manner before 1992. It shows up at that date in a Usenet posting. No use in Usenet from 1981-1992. If it were used commonly in speech during that period, it almost certainly would have shown up in Usenet.
My newspaper database doesn’t show it used before the song.
Wow – '92? I never would have guessed it was that late. Yikes.
Thanks, samclem!
I distinctly recall my aunt using that phrase in the late '50s, and she was hardly on the linguistic cutting-edge. And in my experience, it’s **always **used in a “put down” manner.
Hm, that might be it – kind of an old-fashioned phrase, and thus not used by young-uns on usenet?
This website suggests that the Egyptians considered the tears of Isis to cause the annual flooding of the Nile river, so at least there was a long-time association (in mythology) between tears and rivers. There’s also the constellation Eridanus, which this site says may have been named after the tears of Heliades.
Not that I’m sayin’ your aunt is that old. I’m just sayin’.
Hell, I was using it as a put down in the 1950’s…
Here’s my revised statement.
I doubt very seriously that the phrase was used before the song. If it was, it wasn’t in general use.
Once the song occured, it’s not hard to believe that the phrase “cry me a river” could be independently used by multiple persons to tell someone something akin to “hey, cry your eyes out, I don’t give a damn!”
But I couldn’t find any evidence that it was a common phrase in everyday language in the 1955-90 period.
Thanks for checking, samclem – I truly appreciate it.
A Yahoo! search for “cry a river” (without the me component) returns over 30,000 hits. Perhaps the search for older references to the expression might benefit from the less specific wording. The notion of crying a large quantity of tears – a river’s worth, an ocean’s worth – can’t have originated in the late 20th century, IMO.
I do know from personal experience that the song (Julie’s version anyway) dates from before she was singing the Marlboro commercials. And that was before the Marlboro Man was a big star and the main icon for those cigarettes. Check her Wikipedia entry.