As I was preparing the same evening repast referred to in my thread on pork chops, I had occasion to attack a recalcitrant container of applesauce. It finally yielded to my torquefied assaults after I held its little head under some hot water. Be that as it may, after I got it open, I smelled the delightful pomaceous aroma emerging therefrom, and was moved to rhapsodize, “Aaaah! Pure appley goodness!”
What is the origin of this phrase? I first heard it on The Simpsons as “pure beer goodness!” (without the adjectival ending on “beer”, you will note.) From whom did they get it?
When I read the subject of the post, I thought of two lines:
“pure beer goodness”
“chock full of heady goodness”
Of course, both of these are from The Simpsons. I’m not aware of a “pure X goodness” that existed before. In the Simpsons beer ad from the 50s, it just sounded like something from a corny old ad. I think the rest of the line was something like “fills your Q zone with pure beer goodness.” Just something to rank way high on the cornball scale.
In the late 19th/early 20th century, they used to say, “pure D goodness”, sometimes spelled “pure Dee goodness”. I always assumed it was a bowdlerized version of “damn good”.
[hijack]
Did you ever notice that “pure” is one of those words that if you stare at it for a while, it starts looking really weird?
[/hijack]
It’s just adspeak. SCTV spoofed it once in a mock commercial starring a couple of big, beefy football players. One was singing the praises of some sort of meal, ready-to-eat, featuring a big hunk of red meat, something fried, and something slathered with creamery butter. “Isn’t that a bit heavy?” asks the other gridder. “That’s right,” says the first, “heavy with goodness.”
This expression is still used. It seems to be particularly common in Texas. There’s an column on it in one of William Safire’s books which collect his language columns. Why do you think that it was common in the late 19th century? What’s your source?
I was being sarcastic. Heaven knows there already enough posts on cosmic subjects written in down-home style (“Well, shucks, I don’t know much about general relativity…”) so I figured they could use one in the opposite direction.
I seem to recall the term “Wholesome goodness” used by the Hostess company back in the 70’s. I remember seeing a commercial for twinkies and hearing the mother say something to the effect of, “…and with Twinkie’s wholesome goodness I know that I can trust them to be a nutritional snack for my children.”
What a crock! I always asked, “How do you define ‘Wholesome Goodness’?”
Oh, man, that was one of my favorite ad campaigns, no kidding! “I don’t feed my kids just ANY old junk food, nothing but the best, Hostess Cupcakes…”
Wendell, I dunno, I just read a lot, especially stuff about “olden times”, straight history, fiction, everything, and I just recalled running across the phrase “pure Dee” here and there, and it seemed as though it was being used instead of “damn”. Like “ain’t that just pure dee” something.
I have a friend named Purdy and he says his name came from the Norman knights that conquered England in 1066. One of the knights accompanying William the Conquerer was named Pur De Couer (French for “pure of heart”). The knights received vast English estates, interbred with the locals, and Purdy became a fairly common English name.
“pur de” means “pure of” in French, so it probably went into the the southern US with the Acadians from Nova Scotia who became the Cajuns.
Having said all that, I know matt speaks French so he is probably after a very obscure trivia item. As a couple of posters have suggested, it’s probably a buzz line from some ancient commercial. With about 45 years of television commercials to search this question should be worth a million dollars from Regis.