Yesterday’s football shocker, when the New England Patriots held Tim Tebow to only 10 points, started me thinking about the word “blowout” – a favorite word in our household.
If you’re a fervent Honeymooners fan, you know that the Kramdens and the Nortons used to celebrate special occasions with a blowout at a favorite Chinese restaurant. To this day, if my husband unexpectedly finds a ten-dollar bill in a pants pocket, he’ll wave it at me and shout “Blowout! Blowout!”
I started thinking about the word blowout when I logged on to Facebook early this morning. Friends had already lined up to comment on the demise of Tebowmania (another great word).
I’m not taking sides on this (although I have a sister who lives in Massachusetts – you can draw your own conclusions).
What I want to talk about for a moment is the word blowout itself. Yes, it’s in the dictionary – but (at least until recently) referring just to blown tires and mining. Only recently did the American Heritage Dictionary add the definitions referring to a feast or a sports fiasco.
The ultimate authority, of course, is the Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks to the Internet, we can now see words under consideration for future editions. The definitions of blowout that we’re talking about are on that draft list. Blowout in the sense of a feast goes back to 1823. The failure usage first appeared in print in 1923.
No one knows when blowout was first used for a pizza outing, but I can confidently predict that you’ll hear it in our house tomorrow: Plans for our weekly trip to Pizza Town are already in place. Knowing the quality of the food there, I can tell you that our trip will definitely not be a fiasco.
As for Tim Tebow and the Broncos, there’s always next year.
