Early Use
The phrase in its pejorative sense has been used since at least the mid-1950s. In a letter to the editor of the LA Times in 1956, a correspondent bemoaned a decline in College Pro Football and mentioned "majoring in underwater basket weaving, or the preparation and serving of smorgasbord, or, particularly at Berkeley, the combined course of anatomy and panty-raiding". The following year, an article in the National Review mentioned that "the bored students in the educationists' courses call those dreary subjects 'underwater basket-weaving courses'", and another year on a newspaper column noted that "One seaside university is bowing to the stern educational demands of the times by eliminating its popular course in underwater basket weaving". An article in the Daily Collegian at Penn State University in 1961 refers to a parody in which "a 'typical' Miami coed majoring in underwater basketweaving was interviewed". An article from 1976 refers to football players so dumb that they had to take underwater basket weaving, and another 1976 article refers to underwater basket-weaving as "an old old family joke".
Read more about this topic: Underwater Basket Weaving
Famous quotes containing the word early:
“I taught school in the early days of my manhood and I think I know something about mothers. There is a thread of aspiration that runs strong in them. It is the fiber that has formed the most unselfish creatures who inhabit this earth. They want three things only; for their children to be fed, to be healthy, and to make the most of themselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)