What's a ‘nothing burger'? An official history of the popular phrase

“Nothing burger.” Some people wince at the oratorical decline it represents while others debate the finer points of punctuation swirling about it (Should it be hyphenated? Capitalized? One word or two?)

But there's no disputing that the phrase is on everyone's lips these days, especially in Washington, D.C. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus earlier this week dismissed Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer (purportedly to get dirt on Hillary Clinton) as a "nothing burger." Back in March, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz described Attorney General Jeff Sessions' meetings during the presidential campaign with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak as a "nothing burger."

And #NothingBurger is a thing on Twitter right now with people on the left and the right using it to disparage the others' thoughts, actions and, well, use of the phrase "NothingBurger."

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Indeed, the phrase is so goofy -- especially coming from the lips of grown people in positions of power -- that it has to be an invention of the LOL era, no?

That would be a no burger. It turns out “nothing burger” has a long and colorful history that stretches back at least to the 1950s and even has a direct connection to the current U.S. Supreme Court.

It may have first entered the mainstream via 1950s Hollywood gossip columns: Back in the 1950s, dueling gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper ruled Tinseltown with iron fists and blind items that could make or break careers. A Wall Street Journal article says that "Parsons was the first to popularize "nothingburger" (sometimes spelled as "nothing burger" or "nothing-burger")." The Journal article reported on a "word researcher" who found an instance of Parsons writing that "if it hadn't been for (studio head) Sam Goldwyn, ('Strangers on a Train' star) Farley Granger might very well be a 'nothingburger.'"

Cosmo founder Helen Gurley Brown sexed the phrase up in the 1960s: Or did she unsex it? Whatever, she made it her thing. Brown, who first turned heads with her 1964 book, "Sex and the Single Girl," was fond of using two similar sounding phrases to describe her pre-"Having it All" self (and others like her): One was "mouseburger." The other was "nothing burger." As in, "Wearing one great pin four days in a row is better than changing to nothing-burger clinkers," from her 1965 followup book, "Sex and the Office."

"Nothingburger" showed up in the Urban Dictionary in 2006: It was spelled as one word and with a lower case "b," which seems tonally in keeping with that first definition: "Something lame, dead-end, a dud ... especially something with high expectations that turns out to be average, pathetic, or overhyped." Since then, five more "nothingburger" definitions and contextual uses have been added in the online dictionary. One that was added just this month suggests "nothingburger" can sometimes be applied to the Fourth Estate. And not in a good way: In that case, a nothingburger is "a news story hyped up by the mainstream media for ratings or for political agenda."

Read more at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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