When Pope Benedict resigned several years ago, I coined the brilliant observation “He was too pooped to pope.” But with a bazillion people in the world, I know I can’t have been the only genius to think of it.
Smooth Move, Ex-Lax!
I’m pretty sure John Lennon coined that.
Nope. The pun appeared in print as early as 1934.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/23/heels/
Oh, okay. I can buy that. Lennon famously said it after his court case to get his green card was over.
Also, my brother coined “Beer me.” And yes, that’s where The Simpsons got it.
I think I came up with, “we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”. But since I’ve never heard anyone else say it, I guess it never caught on. Maybe now you all can help me make it so.
I’ve heard “we’ll burn that bridge when we get there”
There’s a song lyric with that sentence in it. Can’t remember who sang it.
ETA Brooks and Dunn, ‘We’ll burn that bridge’
1) Urban Dictionary has an entryfor “no sure, shitlock” from 2010, but that’s just obviously inferior.
2) “Shitlock” is apparently used to derisively describe dreadlocks, but I’m not sure if it’s only a critique of some styles of dreadlocks or just a gross (probably racist) statement about dreads in general. Anyway, this appears to be Eddie Murphy dissing some guy’s dreads by calling them “shitlocks” in The Nutty Professor: YARN | Oh, Reggie, I heard of dreadlocks, but shitlocks? | The Nutty Professor (1996) | Video clips by quotes | e34a1450 | 紗
3) I think you get full credit based on my perusal of the first page of Google results for “shitlock.” It has zero Google ngram results, btw.
My most potentially awesome coined phrase was “no skin off my dick” – a crasser version of “no skin off my nose” – but a) I only used it, like, twice, because talking about “my dick” is just weird for me, even in a figure of speech, and b) others have come up with it* too. See https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/no-skin-off-my-dick/Content?oid=60418 et al.
*and variants: “no skin off my sack” is nice, for one.
All too often I hear “No skin off my teeth.” by people who think that’s the right expression.
I thought up “Nostalgia ain’t what is used to be.” back in college. Wrote it on a white board in the computer center. A year or two later it was used on Carson. Thief!
Back in the mid 1980s a friend and I would use the phrase, “Sucks to be you.” At the time I assumed we’d invented it (we liked to play around with word order for humorous effect). As far as I knew the phrase was unique to us until I heard it used in a television show in the 1990s at which point my thought was, “Huh, I guess we didn’t invent that. I guess we heard it somewhere. I didn’t realize that was a thing other people said.”
After reading this thread I tossed it into google ngram though and I think we may actually have a case.
- ngram shows the phrase originating in the late 1980s and then growing rapidly to it’s current usage rate.
- My friend and I worked on a college humor magazine together and have multiple published instances of the phrase being used in that magazine earlier than Google’s earliest cite.
3a) Part of the culture of college humor magazines back then is when you published an issue you’d send copies to all the other college humor magazines on your mailing list. We’d mail out about two dozen of each issue this way.
3b) ngram’s earliest cite of the phrase was from one of the humor magazines on our mailing list in about 1990.
And finally I know a few writers I met through the college humor magazine circles who went on to write for television.
So it may actually be that a goofy phrase we coined as high school students sometime around 1984 made it’s way into popular culture.
Now it could still be that we heard it from someone else and liked it; but now that I’ve seen the numbers I’m going to take credit.
When Pope Francis got the gig, I posted “Francis is Jorge Bergoglio’s altar ego.”
If anyone else ever makes that same pun, let the record show that they stole it from me. 
Around 1976 I interviewed a Wobbly who been active in the 1920s and was still a fiery radical. When I asked how he remained optimistic about social change, he replied, “well, Rome wasn’t burnt in a day.”