Not great, Bob!

April 18, 2018 8:03 AM

Help me win an argument with my boyfriend! Is the phrase, "Not great, Bob!" from the season 6 finale of Mad Men, anachronistic?

I cannot believe that I'm wasting a question on this, but since I'm still irritated about this argument two weeks later, here we are.

"Not great, Bob," is a phrase I use fairly frequently. The other day, my boyfriend suggested that the phrase (and its sarcastic delivery) seems odd for the time period of the show and wondered if it was an unwitting anachronism. I think this is errant nonsense, but it's been surprisingly difficult to prove via Google, since it's such a common phrase.

Season 6 is set in 1968. I do know that the use of the word "great" to mean terrific (rather than large, grand, substantial, etc.) had already been in common parlance for a very long time, not least because of Tony the Tiger's Frosted Flakes catchphrase, which had been around since the mid '50s. What I'd really like, though, is to point to specific usages of the phrase "not great" in a novel, movie, or other media source previous to 1968.

I realize that this is so petty, but it will put my mind at ease to be proven right (or even wrong, I suppose, if it comes to that).

posted by merriment to Media & Arts (23 answers total)

One data point: Google's Ngram viewer shows "not great" peaking between 1900 and 1940, but still at relatively high levels in the 1960s compared to today.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:42 AM on April 18, 2018

Response by poster: Hmm. A quick browse of the texts cited in the Ngram for 1933-1968 mostly seem to give examples of "not great" meaning "not significant" or "not substantial" rather than the slang-y usage I'm looking for, but it does give me a place to start.
posted by merriment at 8:48 AM on April 18, 2018

@NotMyselfRightNow: if you click through to see those usages for 1917 - 1932, though, they are all using "great" to mean large, not good (or Great Britain, or other irrelevant usages), so I don't think that evidence is in @merriment's favour.

On preview, what @merriment just said.
posted by richb at 8:50 AM on April 18, 2018

Here's a google books search for "not great" limited to 1900-1970. There are very few hits, only three pages! Most instances I see are not at all related to the usage you give, and I cannot see a single use which matches, though I did not read through all three pages closely.

On preview, on balance: he may be right. I'd give him extra points if he remembers that time, I do not.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:51 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

“Not great” as in the example is different from buried in a sentence, and the google Ngram doesn’t seem to differentiate. I remember 1968, and it feels anachronistic to me.
posted by FencingGal at 8:51 AM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Why do you think Pete's use here is sarcastic? It's condescending but not sarcastic. Sarcastic would be if he said "Great, Bob."
Your own meta-use if you quote Pete is sarcastic.
Although I was a bit too young to remember, I was a kid in 1968 and I am positive that throughout my childhood people used "great" to mean the slang-y positive. And people said "Oh, great" in a sarcastic way through the 70s, which I do remember, so '68 doesn't seem too far off.
BUT... I will say that Pete's tone, delivery and accent do sound anachronistic to my ears. His vowels would've been a bit tighter. Even an aggressive, big tone would have sounded a little different. People really just sounded a little different then. That's something you can easily check on youtube.
posted by velveeta underground at 9:01 AM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

From screenplay for Rosemary's Baby (1968):

- Don't forget the pills. - No, I won't. Goodbye, Dr Hill.

Blood sugar?

What's that?

Oh! That's great! That's just great.
posted by velveeta underground at 9:05 AM on April 18, 2018 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Sorry to say I am going against you as well, merriment. It felt wrong to me at the time, and while I don't remember the 60s either, I do know that Matthew Wiener wasn't always rigorous about policing his language in the show. Other lexical anachronisms include "I am so over you", "In a good place" as metaphor, and "I need".
posted by Rock Steady at 9:15 AM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I can attest, from personal experience, that "great" was already in use to mean both "wonderful" and its sarcastic opposite by at least the mid-60's, probably earlier, and used that way by high schoolers, which means it was probably being used by adults earlier. 1968 is certainly late enough.
posted by ubiquity at 9:52 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

The question isn’t about the word ‘great’, it’s about the phrase ‘not great’.

Also re:sarcasm. Wikipedia says it is “a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt”. So the example seems sarcastic to me. Some sarcasm uses a reversal of a literal meaning, but it doesn’t have to.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:34 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Well, litotes as a figure of speech was certainly around, so I wouldn’t say it was anachronistic even if linguistic creativity is out of character for plain-spoken Pete. and you mean arrant nonsense ヅ
posted by nicwolff at 10:39 AM on April 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

> I remember 1968, and it feels anachronistic to me.

Same here. Of course it's not impossible for someone to have used the phrase, but it feels like something imported from a later decade.
posted by languagehat at 10:58 AM on April 18, 2018

Response by poster: and you mean arrant nonsense ヅ

Oh my God, you're right.
posted by merriment at 11:24 AM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oooh just one more (because here is the same little casual how's it going? structure) then I'm done :)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

POOLE IS SEATED AT A TABLE READING HIS ELECTRONIC NEWSPAD.

BOWMAN (softly) Hi... How's it going?
POOLE (absent but friendly) Great.
posted by velveeta underground at 11:42 AM on April 18, 2018

To my recollection the phrase "it's not great!" delivered in a kind of strained sarcastic way, is from something specific in the late 90s or early 2000s. Like maybe a line delivered by Chandler or Ross from Friends?
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:44 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ok, a bit of evidence - try a Google n-gram of "Not great." with that capitalization - the graph respects the capitalization, so this captures these two words being used as a single utterance, and will rule out some of the irrelevant results. (It could still be being used in the "the meal was only good, not great as I was hoping" sense, rather than the "the meal was not great" = the meal was bad sense. But even so, the two-word combo as a sentence is basically not used until around the early 1980s, and then it rises, and rises more steeply during the 90s and early 2000s.

Similar results for google n-gram of "not great right now", to get 'great' being used in roughly the right sense. There's nothing until 1980, then it goes up thru the '90s and 00s.
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:28 PM on April 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

And likewise for "It's not great." with that capitalization, results only become significant after 1980.
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:50 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I mentally hear this sentence with a very specific bitter, cynical, faux-hearty inflection that feels a lot more like late 90's/early 2000's style sarcasm than it does 1960's. I agree that it's a believable Friends line.

(Actually, I think maybe I am hearing Red Foreman of That 70's Show, set but not made in the 1970's, say it to his annoying neighbour Bob. Perhaps that's the influence?)

Admittedly, I wasn't alive in the 1960's, so this is all based on the media I have taken in. My sources are weak but I'm calling anachronistic.
posted by windykites at 2:38 PM on April 18, 2018

"I'm feeling great" - which seems to use great in much the same way (?) - has lots of hits during this time period in Google Books:

• Are you all right? How are you feeling? And I said I'm feeling all right and he said You should be feeling great, I'm feeling great. (1971)
• The 28-year-old former House of hanel model was dressed in black Vietcong pajamas (custom-tailored to fit her 11, 5-foot-9 frame), straw coolie hat with sandals cut from old rubber tires and announced: "I'm feeling great." 'Bao Chi' (1967)
• To cut the story short, the man has left now for the third time, and my third smack on the behind is over, and I'm feeling great. (1971)
• A couple of times I've had a miserable cold, or maybe a touch of the flu, and I'd just as soon have stayed in bed. But after being on the job a couple of minutes, playing the music people love, being a part of it, seeing the dancers, all of a sudden I'm not feeling lousy anymore — I'm feeling great! (1964)
• etc.

Also "How are you? Great!":

• Well, how the hell are you?" "Great! How are you?" "Great! How are you?" "Great! Couldn't be better. Everything going all right?" "Great! All right with you?" "Great! All right with you?" "You bet." (1957)
• how are you ?” “Great, Neal and you '?" “Fine,” he said. (1961)
• “Fine, thanks, Melvin, how are you?” “Great, thanks.” (1960)

So clearly "great" could be used to answer a question like "How are you" or to tell how you're feeling. Great was often used in that sense--like "fine" or "good" but even more so.

So there might be some other particulars of this situation that aren't period-appropriate, but certainly the usage of "great" in that particular sense was common.

The use of phrases like "not good" or "not great" to answer a question like "How are you?" might have arisen later than this time period. The "not good"/"not great" in that situation is a pretty specific little idiom, and I'm not sure when its use started.

But "How are you? Great!" was super-common in this time period.
posted by flug at 4:04 PM on April 18, 2018

Nobody’s arguing about “great” by itself.
posted by FencingGal at 4:08 PM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

As the OED notes that in colloquial usage -- and originating in the US, at that -- "great" has been used as a general term of approval since the early 19th century, the argument that it could not be used in a negative sense with a "not" strikes me as questionable at best. Particularly as quotidian speech is not formal.
posted by mr. digits at 4:23 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

How's this for not helpful: I don't recall this from the few eps I saw, however I listen to old radio shows all the time and this sounds right for even earlier periods. (That said, every third person on a radio show has a gun which is no more true-to-life than the apartments on 98% of contemporary TeeVee shows.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 5:03 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks to everyone who weighted in. It really does relieve my mind to have an answer, even though I was (probably) wrong. The absence of a ready example of the phrase being used in that specific way prior to 1968, along with Rock Steady's evidence of other careless uses of anachronistic phrases in the show, seems to tilt this in my boyfriend's favor. So I owe him an apology!
posted by merriment at 8:12 AM on April 20, 2018 [2 favorites]