After I first met Claire and we were going out, she often used a term that I wasn’t familiar with and really didn’t know what it meant. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time and a few days ago she used it again — the first time I remember her saying it in many years. The term or phrase is “How ‘bout them apples?”
“How ‘bout them apples?” is an idiom — seems like I’ve talked about idioms quite a bit over the course of writing this blog, but I find them interesting because they’re often used in American lingo. And — they don’t make any sense to non-English speaking people…. the words or sentence can’t be taken literally — you can’t deduce the meaning from the words alone.
My extensive research on this particular idiom revealed a couple of things:
1. The phrase is often used as a way to mock or tease someone after gaining some kind of victory over them. It’s similar to the expression “stick that in your pipe and smoke it!”
2. The saying is also used after someone receives surprising information.
I think the latter is the way Claire uses it.
The phrase became kind of famous in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. The movie stars Matt Damon who plays the character Will Hunting, a mathematical genius working as a school janitor. At one point in the movie he gets into a verbal fight with a rival who was trying to impress a girl. After the exchange, Will Hunting gets the girl’s phone number, and then later, in order to taunt his rival over the argument he walks up to him and initiates the following conversation:
Hunting: “Do you like apples?”
Rival: “Yeah.”
Hunting pulls out a piece of paper with the girl’s number written on it and shows it to him.
Hunting: “Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?”
Of course, the idiom didn’t come from this movie. The popular belief is that it originated during World War I. During the period 1915 to 1917, the United Kingdom’s Royal Ordinance Factory created a 1 inch medium trench mortar. The bomb was a sphere attached to a 22-inch bomb shaft and resembled a candy apple — it was given the name “toffee apple.” The bomb was used by Allied troops, and when firing these mortars at the enemy lines, they would taunt with “How do you like them apples?”
Some credence is landed to the theory in the 1959 movie Rio Bravo. One of the film’s characters fired a mortar at the enemy, exclaiming “How do you like them apples/“
Like most of these things, no one is quite sure of the origin — I found one source that claims the expression dates back to at least the year 1895, claiming it appeared in the Bryan, Texas newspaper The Eagle, September 26, 1895: “Bryan is the best cotton market in this section of the state and has received more cotton than any other town in this section. How do you like them apples?”
So now I know that the phrase wasn’t original with Claire — how ‘bout them apples?
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