Yesterday's Print

Showing 11 posts tagged fat and sassy

A collection of old photographs, historic newspaper clippings and assorted excerpts highlighting the parallels of past and present. Featuring weird, funny and baffling headlines, articles and advertisements! Visit www.yesterdays-print.com 

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Why was everyone fat and sassy

Asked by the-pasemi

Why wouldn’t they be?! 

To really answer your question, I have no clue! I tried to figure out if it was the name of a play or a revue or something like that, but as far as I can tell it was just an idiom that began sometime around 1890. There was a racehorse with that name in the 1910s but the two words began appearing together way before that! It seems to be used most often to refer to animals (“the horse looked starved but now he’s fat and sassy as ever”), farming (”Missouri crops appear fat and sassy this season”) and politicians (“the senator made a whistle-stop yesterday afternoon, looking fat and sassy”), if that means anything.

thefreedictionary.com says 

Fat and sassy 
Fig. in  good  health  and  spirits.

Here’s the Google Ngram Viewer chart:

image

Looks like 1896, 1915, 1928, 1946, 1948, 1954 and 1989 are peak years for being fat and sassy!