Fancies and Stalwarts: American Slogans and Sayings, Past and Present

At the recreation of the Truman Oval Office at the Truman Library in 1959, former President Truman poses by his old desk which has the famous "The Buck Stops Here" sign. Public Domain

Whatever we may think of him, like other politicians, Donald Trump has a knack for creating and using catchphrases that become his trademark. “Too big to rig” and “Swamp the vote” were very much in play during the 2024 campaign. Since 2022, “Drill, baby, drill!”—a phrase about fossil fuels invented in 2008 by Republican National Chair Michael Steele and popularized by Sarah Palin during her vice-presidential run that same year—has seen a revival by Trump’s camp.  Off and on for the last seven years, Trump also used “Drain the swamp” as his way of promising to end D.C. cronyism and out-of-control bureaucracies.

Will these catchphrases endure? It’s too early to answer that question, though one of president-elect Trump’s inventions, MAGA or “Make America Great Again,” will likely have a long shelf life.

A Trump supporter shows his MAGA hat during a Trump campaign-style rally in Wellington, Ohio, on June 26, 2021. Stephen Zenner/AFP via Getty Images

Political slogans and popular phrases and adages derived from the culture are constantly appearing in our national lexicon. Most of these eventually vanish, victims of change and circumstance, though some have demonstrated remarkable staying powers. Because they shed light on our American past and our values, and because they are frequently entertaining, these slogans and idioms are worth a look.

From Other Politicians

Published in 2009, this compilation of over 50 slogans and catchphrases documents their origins and their appeal to the masses.

In “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History,” English professor and speechwriter Jan R. Van Meter collected over 50 of these sayings. For each of these phrases, he sets up the history behind it, explains at length the reason for its popular appeal and its impact on the culture and politics of the time, and briefly summarizes its impact on later generations.

Some of the taglines and their speakers selected by Van Meter are readily identifiable by most Americans. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” Scarlett O’Hara’s “Tomorrow is another day” in “Gone With the Wind,” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” sound a buzzer of recognition every time we hear them. The speakers and origins of other sayings, like Adm. David Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” or Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here” may be lost to us, but the words themselves have retained a place in common usage by the punch of their prose.

A woman holds a placard stating "Give me liberty of give me death" while joining demonstrators at a rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic, in Harrisburg, Pa., on May 15, 2020. Mark Makela/Getty Images

And a few of the catchwords presented by Van Meter, like William Henry Harrison’s 1840 presidential campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” or James Polk’s 1844 campaign signature for the same office, “Fifty-four forty or fight!” have disappeared entirely from the American consciousness, preserved only among scholars and in our books of history.

The Bible and the Bard

Factors other than transient politics have led to the rise and decline of many more popular sayings. During the first century of the American republic, for instance, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare could be found in many American homes and were widely read. Even a president with an impoverished formal education like Abraham Lincoln was intimately familiar with both Scripture and the tragedies, histories, and comedies of the playwright.

Audiences of that time were far more likely than those today to recognize “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” as Shakespearean or “The wages of sin is death” as biblical. When in 1858 Lincoln spoke the words “A house divided against itself cannot stand” while addressing the Republican Convention, most of his audience undoubtedly caught his allusion to the Gospel of Matthew.

With use of these two reference points much diminished in our own time, some once-familiar sayings are now little used. Outside Christian circles, for instance, few people will quote directly from the Bible or even have the knowledge and familiarity with Scripture to exercise it as Lincoln did.

Yet scraps of Scripture remain a part of our daily conversations. In the online article “85 Bible Sayings,” we find common phrases like “land of milk and honey,” “skin and bones,” “scapegoat,” “Pride comes before a fall,” and even “Rise and shine!”—all of which have their origins in the Old and New Testaments.

The same holds true of Shakespeare. On the Bell Shakespeare website, in “Common Phrases in Shakespeare’s Plays,” the writer reminds us that “many phrases from his plays have become part of our common speech, whether we recognize it or not.” Expressions like “salad days,” “full circle,” “a wild goose chase,” and “in my heart of hearts” are only a few of the catchphrases we use today without thinking of “Hamlet” or “King Lear.”

From the Farm

Our agrarian past yields similar mixed results for our use of idioms and catchphrases.

As recently as 1900, 40 percent of the American labor force worked on farms and in fields. Today, that number has fallen to 1.62 percent.

As might be expected, phrases referencing life on a farm have either declined in popularity or disappeared altogether from the public square. We’ll still hear someone say “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” without regarding it as odd or indecipherable, but other sayings are more obscure. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” literally meaning don’t judge a free horse by counting its teeth and a metaphor for leaving unjudged a gift received, will likely baffle all but the equestrians among us. “He’s living in high cotton,” meaning he’s living with wealth and means, may strike listeners as a strange metaphor. And “I need to see a man about a horse,” slang once employed by men who need a quick pause in an outhouse or behind a tree, would today be meaningless.

We’ll still hear and say “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” but few will associate it with the days when some family member carried a bucket of milk from the barn to the house. “Don’t put the cart before the horse” is also easily understood, though horse-drawn carts disappeared from the landscape over a hundred years ago.

Messages From the Movies

Meanwhile, expressions from streams and tributaries unknown to our ancestors feed into our river of language. Movies, television, pop music, and social media play to mass audiences and are constantly producing new catchphrases with broad appeal.

Here, quotes from motion pictures can serve as excellent examples of this ongoing phenomenon. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto” is a close paraphrase of Dorothy’s words to her dog in 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz,” which we still hear from people confronting some strange situation or environment. “Casablanca,” a 1942 film rich in quotable lines, gave us “We’ll always have Paris” and “Round up the usual suspects.”

The scene where Dorothy (Judy Garland) proclaims: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," in "The Wizard of Oz." MovieStillsDB

More recent films have left their trace as well on the language. In the 1989 “Dead Poets Society,” Robin Williams’s “Carpe diem” resuscitated those antique words from the Roman poet Horace and brought them back into general use. From another movie made that year, “Field of Dreams,” we still hear people repeating—to urge on any number of projects—Kevin Costner’s line “If you build it, he will come.” In 1992’s “A Few Good Men,” Jack Nicholson, performing as an army colonel on the witness stand in a courtroom, says, “You can’t handle the truth,” and people, including political commentators, use that line to this day.

Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) hearing voices in his cornfield, in "Field of Dreams." Universal Pictures

Always open to change, always adaptable, and often messy, the English language will go on manufacturing and discarding idioms, catchwords, and other expressions with dispatch and speed. The internet has only increased the velocity of these changes, making everything from political maxims to slang up for grabs by mass audiences. For those of us who imagine the English language as some broad Mississippi-like river winding across the land, its banks and currents ever shifting, with each bend bringing some new word or expression, this ebb and flow of slogans and catchphrases is a source of entertainment and wonder.

To those writers and others who fabricate these new additions to our culture, we logophiles applaud and lift a catchphrase from the 1983 film “Sudden Impact” as delivered by Clint Eastwood: “Go ahead. Make my day.”

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