Whence "in the not-too-distant future"?

October 9, 2009 7:48 PM

What is the origin of the phrase "in the not-too-distant future"?

I'm pretty darn sure I first encountered it through MST3K, and have thereafter sub-defined it as "Next Sunday, A.D." ...in fact, for years I've interpreted its use as an under-the-radar MiSTie shibboleth.

BUT surely there must be an earlier origin? (Crow: "No! And don't call me Butt Shirley!")

/mst3k nerd

It just strikes me as odd that the particular construction of "not-too-distant" would replace the use of "near" so frequently without deliberate precedent.

posted by unregistered_animagus to writing & language (10 comments total)

Plenty of examples of the phrase show up in a Google Books search, this one as early as 1897.

So neither it or, say, "Watch out for snakes!" have their origins in MST3k.

"This is where the fish lives!" however....
posted by unsupervised at 8:03 PM on October 9 [2 favorites]

Well, it's in the foreword of my copy of "Polymerization of aldehydes and oxides", published in 1963.

A quick google scholar search turns up lots of pre-1988 references, so it was definitely well-established before MST3K.
posted by Pinback at 8:03 PM on October 9

A common variation is "not so distant", and it gets applied to time (past/future), relationships, and any number of other terms where proximity is literal or figurative. ("Not so distant" brings up close to 6 million Google hits; "not too distant" is closer to 1.3 million).

Someone with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary could probably give a more precise answer about the origins of both phrases.
posted by maudlin at 8:08 PM on October 9

I've heard it my whole life, and I antedate your little TV show. I think you call that a data point.
posted by JimN2TAW at 8:26 PM on October 9

Sounds like a lawyer wrote it long long ago.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:32 PM on October 9

The "not too X" construction -- once quite common -- is archaic to modern ears, and will get used in jocular, MST3K-like contexts to give something an air of pretension -- like the criminologist in Rocky Horror. If writing, it would be best avoided unless you are trying for a bit of that.
posted by dhartung at 8:44 PM on October 9 [1 favorite]

It means something different from "near". The near-future could be tomorrow, and is just like today but hasn't happened yet; the distant future will be all but unrecognisable with morlocks and eloi and whatnot, but inbetween is the not-too-distant future, in which things are mostly familiar but there are enough interesting differences to base a science fiction story on. The future in question is not necessarily imminent, as might be suggested by "near future", but on the other hand it is not so distant that we should feel disconnected from it.
This is obvious to me, but I am British and accustomed to the fine art of understatement and the nuances that such torture of the language can achieve. For instance, Watson and Crick's (surely Crick's!) famous "It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests…"
A not dissimilar effect can be achieved with double-negatives, eg: "not insignificant", "not unpraiseworthy".
posted by nowonmai at 8:49 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

there's also the none too distant variation.
posted by philip-random at 10:00 PM on October 9

Archaic? Omigod, I know I'm going to be 40 in a few months -- the not too distant future, in fact -- but I had no idea it was archaic.

I think it has two distinct uses. One is as a straightforward hedge for predictions, the other is using its litotic flavour to convey archness and snark. The snark flavour is stronger when spoken because this is mostly a literary construction.

I am quite familiar with the phrase and would never associate it with that weird acronym, whatever it is. It's just another commonplace English idiom.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:45 PM on October 9

And here's another from Google Books, this time from 1856. None from prior to that, as far as i can tell, but it's used in a way that implies it's not a rare phrase; probably even cliched back then.
posted by barnacles at 1:40 AM on October 10