You really Britta’d this thread!
Interesting thread. I’ve only watched a couple of seasons of Community so I missed this particular episode. But I’ve never heard the expression “streets ahead” IRL or in any books or articles or in movies or TV. I’m a USian. Is it really that common?
I don’t care if Harmon was being self deprecating or being meta. That’s boring.
I a Usaian who was stationed in the UK for 1.5 years. I never heard it until I saw the Community episode.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t common in the UK, just that it wasn’t common in my little piece of the UK.
American here. I don’t know what “Community” is, but I’ve heard the phrase under discussion.
It was in the movie Help. The scientist pursuing Ringo’s ring has an assistant, an actor we see in other Richard Lester movies. He produces a time-slowing-down gadget, and announces it’s from America, and that it’s “streets ahead of anything we’ve got.” (Paraphrasing.) I had never heard the phrase before, but I grasped its meaning right away.
I don’t see how it would be possible for someone to have read this thread and not figured out what Community is.
I’ve never heard of Community before this thread but from the thread context it’s evidently some TV show.
I’ve known “streets ahead” as a standard Britishism for about 30 years now. I first learned of it within a couple weeks of starting to read The Economist, which is my main window into all things UK. I doubt I’ve ever used it myself.
I suspect (but do not know) it’s now considered a bit old fashioned, so the usage may be dying out or becoming more high-register over in the UK than it was 30 or 50 or whatever years ago.
There’s no crime in that. (As the FBI tip line keeps telling me.)
But there SHOULD be.
You really shouldn’t find it that hard to believe because stuff like that happens with regularity. A modern coffee cup showed up on Game of Thrones, an episode of Parks and Recreation featured a Model UN gathering that placed England on the UN Security Council. Even a show with a paid historical advisor, like Downton Abbey, will fuck up with anachronistic or non-local expressions making it into the dialog.
Which brings this around to the original OP: Babbage is an Economist podcast.
It was an interesting ep btw, especially the section in which the guest was discussing the AI science application that is streets ahead of what’s been to date …
But a poll!
Do you know the phrase and did you think it was coined in the show?
- I never heard it before this
- I only know it from the show and thought they coined it
- I know it from the show but thought it already existed
- I knew it already as a phrase
0
voters
Never heard of the expression before 5 minutes ago, either. USA, SE Louisiana. Completely unknown here.
I learned of it from the show and thought they coined it but then my wife, who is from Ireland, said it in normal conversation. When I commented on her quoting Community she explained that it was an existing expression before it was used on Community. When she watched the show she thought that the joke was on the other characters, not on Pierce.
And that’s the waaaay…the new’s goes.
I would like to take time out of my busy day to appreciate the strides the British have made is using the very nature of competition to insult people.
Minging is a adjective, it means bad, foul-smelling or unpleasant, often used to describe a woman. My favorite English insult is to say someone is, ‘Minging For England’. So this person has taken looking awful to a next level and is not only a professional, but representing England in the world competition for Minging.
The winner:
That’s possibly because (although not etymologically related or sounding the same) it’s probably somewhat associated with the word minge and so became gendered?
Chevy Chase is streets behind.
So it sounds like his character on the show is just a less unpleasant version of him in real life.
Somehow successful humorists tend to turn into old curmudgeons or worse. Not sure whether it’s money, or fame, or just old age and we all expect them to retain youthful irreverence long after that’s simply unrealistic for the actual human behind the clownish stage persona.
I mean, old curmudgeon? Hasn’t he always been known as a big asshole, or maybe it’s me taking things I’ve read about him over the last ten-twenty years and putting it on him back then.