In the film “What About Bob?” the psychiatrist played by Richard Dreyfuss has written a book called “Baby Steps,” and teaches the concept to Bob. Of course in this context “baby steps” means “trying to achieve a difficult goal in very small incremental parts.”
Sine then I’ve used the phrase, and heard other people use it, to mean that, usually in a joking manner. “I thought you quit drinking, Mike?” “Well, at least it’s a mixed drink. Baby steps!”
The thing is I don’t recall the term being used that way BEFORE that movie. Did they invent it for that?
The term “baby steps” is probably most familiar because of the children’s game Mother May I? where it refers to unusually small steps made by the players. If you’re looking for a more metaphorical use of the term, then it still goes back well before the film was released in 1991.
I find it in a book called What is the Fletcher Music Method? (1915): “Yet, as surely as the child must take his first shaky baby steps before he can ‘walk away like a man,’ so surely, must the child take his first shaky baby steps in musical thought.”
Time magazine used it in the September 22, 1941, edition: “The U.S. took two baby steps toward self-sufficiency in rubber.”
However, I don’t think you’re imagining things if you didn’t hear it before 1991. According to Google ngrams, the phrase exploded in popularity about that time. The increase started before the film came out though.
Look at the Google Ngram chart Google Ngram Viewer. The term was used both literally and figuratively before 1980, but it didn’t become a common expression until about that time. It’s not clear why it only became a common term then.
I was personally under the impression that the movie was what pushed the phrase becoming more popular, but I was fairly young then and may not have had access to the part of culture where it was being used more frequently which was the inspiration for its use in the film. Certainly I had never heard of it before the film, and heard it used with regularity soon after.
It was certainly around long before the movie. What the movie did is popularize the joke of people doing mundane tasks with baby steps. Baby steps to get my coat…baby steps out the door…baby steps down the hallway etc.
What really made it catch on, IMO, was Bill Murray taking literal baby steps and narrating it.
One of my all time favorite movies. i remember the term was used before the movie and the movie seemed to be making fun of it’s popular usage of the time.
What we have done at this place to try to correct the wrongs of the present system are only the first baby steps towards social justice, and no one knows this better than the writer.
Ngrams has a few earlier examples, but they are all literal.
One from the British newspaper corpus - “… Tyranny is the natural concomitant of ignorance and barbarism, and despotism the baby-step of civilization. How important, then, it is, that moral and political knowledge should be extended to the great mass …” [Leicester Chronicle 24 Sept 1836].
After that very sparse to c.1880, and also picking it up from that sort of date in Australian newspapers in the usage that the OP was asking about.
The Oxford English Dictionary uses a very similar quote, although it’s example is from a bit later, and from an American anti-slavery paper, which might well have pilfered it from the British example. It has an earlier example, also, from 1825, but it’s not quite clear from the quote whether the reference to baby steps was literal (i.e., a baby trying to walk) or figurative.
No link, because it’s a paid subscription account.
I decided to redo the chart from Google Ngram that I did in post #4 and got Google Ngram Viewer. First, the chart from post #4 drops greatly after 2007 for some reason I don’t understand. I think it’s because it’s impossible to accurately use Google Ngram for measuring occurrences in recent books (say, in the past decade or so). So the new chart I just linked to goes just to 2007. Also, there’s something else I can’t fix that makes the chart somewhat deceptive. Note that the vertical axis is linear. When a quantity increases by a given percentage each year, it’s better to have the vertical axis be logarithmic. If the vertical axis could be converted to a vertical one, it would (I think) show that the occurrences of “baby steps” have been increasing almost steadily since 1946. The vertical axis being linear makes it possible to claim that the rise began in some more recent year, which I now think is not correct. If someone knows how to turn the chart into one with a linear vertical axis, that would be nice.