I thought Bart Simpson was the first originator of the phrase “have a cow,” which was on Ullman in '87, However I was just watching the movie ‘Sumer School’, and one of the students said it. I actually looked it up and didn’t find much information on the etymology of the saying.
I was seven, but don’t remember hearing it before Bart.
Oops,
Could this please be moved to either General Questions, or the Café?
Sorry.
I’m thinking Cafe Society. Sounds like a catchphrase.
I definitely remember my cousin (we both grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area) saying it at least as early as '84. Not sure if I’d encountered it before then or not, but she said it constantly.
Secretary at the school I was at in '78 said it. It wasn’t new then…IIRC, nieghbor by the name of Dale, whom I had last seen in '72 had used it.
Someone will be along with an early cite, but it looong pre-dates The Simpsons.
AFAICT, the 2013 OED (which, subscription only, natch) dates it in print to 1959:
And if that’s the first print reference, it must have originated in vernacular before that. But I don’t have a copy handy or a subscription, so if someone can confirm…?
According to the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, the OED has added the phrase and lists the first known written usage as in 1959 [ninja’d]. I hadn’t really thought of it as referring to giving birth to something large, as in “having kittens” or “shitting a brick.”
I had lumped it mentally with having a fit or a tizzy.
I distinctly remember this being a catchphrase when I was in 8th grade, in 1966. One kid slipped it into a performance of the class play, and of course, brought down the house.
This cite traces the phrase to Gertrude Stein in 1926, but in an entirely different context from how my 8th grade buddy and Bart Simpson intended it.
This cite suggests it popped up in its current form during the 1950s, but more to the point, it specifically notes the phrase was used on a Facts of Life episode first aired on March 24, 1982.
Therre’s also a claim that the phrase was used in the Hill Street Blues 1983 episode “Honk if You’re a Goose.” I can’t verify it, but it seems quite specific.
As a teenager in the early sixties in So Cal, I do remember the phrase to be used by some peers…for the most part, those of us in the “surfer” community.
My cite is my brain.
Grin! Me too. I first heard it in the seventies. You must’ve been more “hip” than I was! (Not hard to do!) Anyway, long before Bart Simpson, or even Life In Hell.
I never associated it with anything else.
I had a sheltered childhood.
Mary had a little lamb… And the doctor fainted.
What happened to the doctor when Old McDonald had a farm?
He shit a brick.
I remember this as a rather clumsy (both in rhyme and meter) rhyme:
Mary had a little lamb,
the doctor was surprised.
When Old McDonald had a farm,
He committed suicide.
Child of the seventies, don’t have a cow, man.