One of the amusing things about The Apartment, in which Jack Lemmon’s character is a harried insurance clerk who is pressured into lending his apartment to his bosses for their romantic trysts, is the extensive use of the -wise ending. Probably the most notable example is when Shirley McLaine says, “That’s the way it crumbles–cookiewise”.
What I want to know, if anyone can possibly tell me, is if there was a fad for that around 1960. Did people go around saying things like that, or was it just a running joke of the screenwriters?
[Note: I honestly wasn’t sure where to put this…I’m hoping for a factual answer, and that’s not necessarily dependent on the film, but it was still the movie that drew my attention to the question].
The use of -wise as an ending was a running joke in advertising speak in the 1950s. You can probably find parodies of its use in humorists from Stan Freberg to MAD magazine. My guess is that its use was beginning to wane by 1960 as the heyday of the ad man and Madison Avenue was already past.
But it was still enough of a problem for the curmudgeonly Theodore M. Bernstein to inveigh against it in his 1965 style guide, The Careful Writer:
