carrot truck, potato truck. i,e, to mean I am not a fool
IOW, I consider you to be bullshitting me and I will conduct my business elsewhere..
Except for the “bullshitting” bit, this may go beyond Shakespeare, Grecian scholars and those other morons,
Looks like it goes back to the ‘70s.
I’m prepared to swear my father was using that expression (“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck”) in the 1960s.
It sure sounds like an old timey expression, but looking for turnip/cabbage/hay truck/wagon all leads me to 1975 as the earliest documented source, at least. I would never have guessed it’s that recent.
As a possible point of reference my father’s parents were part of the Okie migration to Kern County, CA where they grew a lot of turnips.
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Are you specifically looking for turnip trucks? Or just variations on ‘fell out of the tree’? People have been watching fledglings fall out of the nest and die since forever and a day.
Is that an idiom, though? I’m not sure I’ve heard it in the way “fell off a turnip truck” to mean “do you think I was born yesterday.” I mean, if someone said it, I’d understand it, but I’m struggling to think of a concrete time I’ve heard it used as such.
I think maybe the turnip truck thing may stem from “born in a cabbage patch”.
Like ‘young and dumb’
Google found “fell off a turnip truck” in 1947. Perhaps in a literal sense?
There’s always “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” But that doesn’t seem to imply someone was born yesterday. Instead it means something like “you think you just came out of nowhere?”
Seems idiomatic. The very next sentence is “How you got some kind of medical problem that makes you wet behind the ears always”, which is another idiom that means the same thing.
Given the origin of that idiom, I’m always mildly amazed that it was ever considered appropriate in polite company.
The usual origin I see is that it refers to newborns being born covered in amniotic fluid, with the back of their ears being the last place to dry. A little gross I guess, but not exactly impolite. In any case, there’s a good chance it spread among farmers before seeping into general use, at which point the origin was forgotten. Which may not be the origin anyway.
You have to be careful with Google Books results from periodicals. They often list it under the date when the periodical was first published (1947 in the case of The Georgia Review), even when the result is from a more recent edition. Near as I can tell, the result you linked to is from volume 60, which was published in 2006.
[Johnny Carson voice]
I did not know that.
[/JCV]
(Or forgot if I did.)
Yeah I found that and the quote in context (and it was in the current idiomatic sense), but what you said applies: that issue of Georgia Review is from 2006. I’ve gotten excited before with early finds only to realize after checking more carefully that Google doesn’t necessarily list the publication year of the specific issue you’re looking at, but the first published year.
Might it have been based on “just got off the bus”, a maybe more polite way of calling someone unsophisticated?
I found a reference before 1975, I think, but it was a news report where someone actually fell off a turnip truck–or maybe a potato truck, don’t have the cite handy.
You ninja’d me.
The way I understand it, Google went to several large university libraries and invented a new type of scanner that could even turn pages by itself, allowing it to scan huge numbers of books in a short amount of time.
But university libraries normally don’t house individual copies of magazines. They routinely bind a number of issues into hardcovers. The date that Google Books normally uses is the date of the first issue in the bound volume.
I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like 60 years of a title bound together, even though some volumes have loads of missing issues. That’s usually for 19th century magazines, though, and the Georgia Review is a famous literary magazine that university libraries should have every issue of.
At the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever seen magazines dated by the first year of publication either. This one is definitely a mystery.
But there’s no doubt the page is from the Spring 2006 issue.
The lack of an earlier date surprises me as well. It undoubtedly is a “folksier” version of “I wasn’t born yesterday,” dated to the 1800s, and loads of variants have appeared in the 20th century. The Phrase Finder forum had a discussion in 2009 that didn’t come up with an origin but had this post.
Just the first three pages of googling “I didn’t fall off * yesterday” gives:
I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday
I didn’t just fall off the log yesterday
I didn’t fall off an apple tree yesterday
I didn’t fall off a haytruck yesterday
I didn’t fall off the tunatruck yesterday
I didn’t fall off the banana boat yesterday
I didn’t fall off the longship yesterday
I didn’t fall off the boat yesterday
I didn’t fall off the applecart, yesterday
I didn’t fall off the hickory woodpile yesterday
I didn’t just fall off a rock yesterday
I didn’t fall off a chicken truck yesterday
I didn’t fall off the turnip shuttle yesterday
It certainly is an idiom if used by itself. One could just say “You must think me a fool.” and that likely translates well across modern and dead languages.
My wife reminded me off “falling of the wagon” yet that is a specific Irish idiom about drinking. On the wagon: You’ve quit drinking. Off: You relapsed or resumed.
ETA: And that likely has a more or less literal sense to it going back to the temperance movement/prohibition which was happening in Ireland and the UK a bit over 100 years ago as well.