Decades before the internets, and on two separate coasts, I heard an expression that most of you have probably also heard. In appreciation of an attractive woman, some pig would say something which would include: “I’d eat a mile of her shit”. I’ve always wondered what the mechanism would be for that specific expression to spread so far. It’s not like it’s Bible or Shakespeare derived, or even a popular advertisement.
sailing ships and later trains and telegraph allowed ideas to propagate.
Let’s not forget carrier pigeons.
i’m having trouble visualizing that telegram: she was hot stop i’d eat a mile of her shit stop wish you were here stop…:rolleyes:
People moved around even in the olden days. Tens of millions of people from all areas in Europe and quite a few millions from other regions immigrated voluntarily to the U.S. until immigration was made harder in the 1920s.
Once in the U.S. they didn’t all settle in New York City. (It just seemed that way in the Lower East Side.) People moved westward and settled the entire country. But going westward wasn’t a one-way trip. Lots of people went west for a while, say for a gold or silver rush, and returned home.
Merchants, salesmen, politicians, and rich people moved around the country on a regular basis. And not just around the country. Trade between the U.S. and other countries was a huge deal in the days when every single thing had to be brought over by boat.
Soldiers during the various wars also saw large regions of the country unfamiliar to them and many off-color expressions were propagated by the military.
Communication may not have been instant, but since we’re talking about decades or centuries it doesn’t have to be. Americans are a moving people. Every foreign commentator who wrote about the U.S. had plenty to say about the peripatetic nature of our people. Some people never went more than 10 miles from their homes. Many of the rest moved huge distances. There’s no mystery about how words and sayings got around.
I recall reading a study a number of years ago about how certain memes/jokes propagated in the US before the Internet. I believe the main spreaders turned out to be stock brokers in New York, talking to their clients and swapping jokes.
For a personal anecdote, I was in college in San Diego back in the early 1980s. Somehow, I got my hands on a Xeroxed copy of a sheet of paper with some off-colored jokes. A week later, I was visiting my brother in Los Angeles, and he told me a joke, for which I supplied the punch-line. He tried again, with the same results. After the third or fourth failed attempt, he opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper. I pulled my sheet out of my back pocket and compared it to his.
They were from the same source, whoever it had been. They had the same set of smudges and fly-specks on the paper.
And this was before the widespread adoption of fax machines.
So, amazingly enough, popular culture existed before teh intranets.
We used to carve the jokes in stone, drag them on an ox-drawn sledge to the neighbor’s cave so they could have a laugh.
Seriously, did you think any of these things are new? The same old jokes have been recycled forever. Different words are substituted to make them contemporary.
Adam: If you took all the women on earth and laid them end to end…wait, I just did that.
Eve: Your not doing it again tonight.
Not true.
We used to say “I’d eat the peanuts out of her shit.”
So there.