(By the way, for what it's worth, who is responsible for that grade-inflation expression "first ballot Hall of Famer"?
Apparently the Mexican press were responsible for the expression, first used to describe Group Three – England, Brazil, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Tony Soprano's office was at the back of a strip club named "Bada Bing!", an expression first heard in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.
The Victorians coined expressions like "of a mature age" and "70 years young," an expression first credited to Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The complex triple take of her expression: first astonishment, then wicked complicity, and, finally, shame for either the dead poets, themselves, or both.
As far as I recall, the expression first came into vogue politically in 1972, when the Conservative government of Edward Heath completely changed the direction of its economic policy.
The word received a boost when Richard Carlson titled a series of books "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff," an expression first popularized as a book title in 1988 by Michael Mantell.
"The people want to topple the government!" they cried, an expression first heard in protests in Tunisia, then picked up by the demonstrators in Cairo's uprising.
A student of the banjo since he was a child, the instrument that was once a major part of his 70s-era comedy albums has become Martin's main means of expression, first with his bluegrass band the Steep Canyon Rangers and now with musical partner Edie Brickell, former frontwoman of the band the New Bohemians.
In a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book on the Smithsonian's collection of model airplanes, Thomas J. Dietz wrote: "Flight, whether from continent to continent or from this planet to another, begins with an idea that is given expression first in miniature".
