Talk:Keeping up with the Joneses

Cartoon strip origin blatantly untrue
The article's claim that this phrase originated in a cartoon strip is clearly rubbish. There are 19th century sources that use the phrase in a way that suggests it was well known even by then. See e.g. the 1837 source here and 1897 source here. Bermicourt (talk) 15:44, 20 December 2022 (UTC)


 * The comic's significance got upgraded from "popularised" to "originated" a few years ago, I've taken it back down and moved it to the end of the origin's chronology. None of the cited sources seem to make the claim that the comic invented the phrase, they instead say things like the comic's title having "obvious resonance with the public". Belbury (talk) 08:16, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Checking for deeper sources on when the surname became a phrase, both of the ones cited by Bermicourt above are actually misidentified by Google Books. The 1837 text comes from 1967 (it's an 1837 book that's been erroneously bundled up with some 20th century copies of Woman's World) and the 1897 source may be from a later version of Pears Encyclopedia (either given the wrong year, or bundled up as for the other one) - if you search that source for a year like "1960" it returns many results in the text. --Belbury (talk) 09:57, 8 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I can't check the OED directly but https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/01/keeping-up-with-the-joneses.html does actually suggest that the OED cites the 1913 comic as the earliest usage of the full phrase. Belbury (talk) 10:51, 8 October 2023 (UTC)