The story behind the phrase “The Year of Living Dangerously”

Google has a cool tool for researchers of words and phrases (including quotations) called the Ngram Viewer.

It graphs the occurrence of a word or phrase in books published between the years 1500 and 2008.

If you do an Ngram search for the phrase “the year of living dangerously,” you’ll see a huge, continuing spike starting in the early 1980s.

That’s because it gained major worldwide popularity with the release of the ‘80s film The Year of Living Dangerously.

The movie, directed by Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, first debuted in Australia on December 17, 1982.

It was initially given a limited released in the United States on January 21, 1983, then released nationwide here on February 18, 1983.

The Year of Living Dangerously is one of my own favorite romantic adventure films.

It stars Mel Gibson (back when he was still cool and hot), Sigourney Weaver (who is still cool and hot) and Linda Hunt, in her breakthrough, Oscar-winning role as a man.

Depsite how much I liked it then and now, The Year of Living Dangerously was only a modest hit at the box office. (It grossed a mere $10.3 million during it’s run in U.S. theaters.)

However, the movie’s title became a huge linguistic hit as a catchphrase that has become embedded in our language and spawned many variations.

Indeed, if you Google “the year of living *” -dangerously (using Boolean search techniques to look for versions of the phrase that don’t include the word dangerously), you’ll see thousands of different variations.

A few examples include:

• the title of the best-selling book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible;
• the title of the less pious book A Year of Living Sinfully: A Self-Serving Guide to Doing Whatever the Hell You Want;
• an op-ed by humorist Will Durst that dubbed 2012 “The Year of Living Stupidly.” (Durst noted: “…the only thing that really went right with 2012 was we misread the Mayan Calendar. Everything else is either worse than we found it or the same. Middle East a mess? Check. Crazy people with guns? Check. Weather getting weird? Check. Congress unable to accomplish any sort of worthwhile task, including differentiating between their gluteus maximus and yellow paint? Double check.”); and,
• THE YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, a Showtime documentary series exploring the human impact of climate change.

Although the movie made “the year of living dangerously” a widely-known catchphrase, it’s not the origin.

Nor is the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch, which the film version is based on.

The setting for the book and movie is Jakarta, Indonesia during the chaotic period that led to the overthrow of the country’s long-time dictator, President Sukarno.

Author Koch took his title from a speech Sukarno made in 1964.

The President had a custom of giving a special name to each year in his annual “National Day” speech.

In the National Day speech he gave on August 17, 1964, Sukarno named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously.”

This reflected the challenges he knew he faced from his political enemies, who included both hard-line Communists and radical Muslims.

The multilingual leader’s name for the year was based partly on an old Italian phrase he was familiar with — “vivere pericoloso” (“living dangerously”).

Although Sukarno gave the speech in the Indonesian language, he inserted those Italian words after the Indonesian word for year, tahun, to create the name.

The year ahead, he said, would be the “Tahun vivere pericoloso.”

The Google Ngram for “the year of living dangerously” suggests that it first appeared in English-language books around the time Sukarno gave his 1964 National Day address.

Some sources credit him with coining it and, based on what I know at this point, I think he probably did.

Either way, his choice of the name for the coming year certainly turned out to be prophetic.

In September of 1965, a bloody coup began that led to his overthrow.

Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were killed in the power struggle. Sukarno survived and was allowed to live out the rest of his days under “house arrest,” until his death in Jakarta on June 21, 1970.

His phrase “the year of living dangerously” and its numerous linguistic offspring live on.

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Looking back at some famous quotes generated by the “Lewinsky Scandal”

In addition to generating a lot of political fireworks, the “Lewinsky Scandal” involving President Bill Clinton and 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky generated several famous quotations.

On January 26, 1998, President Bill Clinton held a press conference in which he famously and vehemently denied having an affair with Lewinsky, saying:

       “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!”

Of course, months later, after a grand jury investigation, he admitted that he did.

But on January 27, 1998, the day after Bill’s initial high profile denial, First Lady Hillary Clinton defended her husband and uttered another now-famous quote.

She said it in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show.

Lauer politely but persistently asked tough questions about Bill’s “alleged” affair with Monica and about the so-called “Whitewater” investigation into the Clintons’ past financial affairs, which was being conducted by independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

Hillary gamely stood by her husband, just as she did six years earlier, during the Clintons’ game-changing January 26, 1992 interview on 60 Minutes, when she huffed: “I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette.”

In the Today Show interview, when Lauer asked her about Lewinsky, Clinton said (apparently unaware of the multiple ironies): “I think the important thing now is to stand as firmly as I can and say that, you know, the president has denied these allegations on all counts, unequivocally.”

She went on to say she was “very concerned about the tactics being used and the kind of intense political agenda” of people who were criticizing and investigating the Clintons.

She told Matt:

“The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Hillary’s use that day made the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” a widely-known political phrase. But she didn’t coin it.

It had been used years before in news stories unrelated to the Clintons.

In 1991, a story about British movies in the Detroit News said: “Thatcher-era Britain produced its own crop of paranoid left-liberal films... All posited a vast right-wing conspiracy propping up a reactionary government ruthlessly crushing all efforts at opposition under the guise of parliamentary democracy.”

An Associated Press story in 1995 used the phrase in a story about the Oklahoma City bombing, saying it was the work of a few malcontents rather than “some kind of vast right-wing conspiracy.”

In the fall of 1998, the Lewinsky Scandal went on to generate yet another famous quote.

On August 17, 1998, President Clinton gave videotaped testimony to the grand jury. The video was released publicly by the House Judiciary Committee of Congress on September 21, 1998.

When it was, the world heard Bill’s legendary response when asked if he and Monika had previously lied when they said there is no sexual relation between them. He said, straight-faced:

“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If ‘is’ means is and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”

I am not now and never have been part of any right-wing (or left-wing) conspiracy. But I have to say, I think that “meaning of the word ‘is’” quote, in particular, is an example of why Bill got the nickname “Slick Willie.”

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The origins of “Rum, sodomy and the lash” – Churchill’s alleged quip about British naval tradition…

Many books of quotations include a caustic quote attributed to Winston Churchill (1874-1965) in which he supposedly called British naval tradition nothing but “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” (Sometimes given as “rum, buggery and the lash,” using the old British slang term “buggery” to refer to homosexual sex.)

The earliest source commonly cited for this quip is the diary of former British diplomat, politician and author Harold Nicolson (1886-1968).

In a diary entry dated August 17, 1950, Nicolson recorded some anecdotes about Churchill.

One involves a version of the “rum, sodomy, and the lash” quote.

But the version Nicolson wrote about that day included “prayers” in the litany. His diary entry says:

…when Winston was at the Admiralty, the Board objected to some suggestion of his on the grounds that it would not be in accord with naval tradition. ‘Naval tradition? Naval tradition?’ said Winston. ‘Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.’

This is why some books of quotations give the alleged Churchill quote as “rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.”

The source commonly cited for the shorter version of the naval tradition quip is a book of reminiscences by former British Vice-Admiral Peter Gretton (1912-1992). According to an anecdote in Sir Peter Gretton, Former Naval Person: Winston Churchill and the Royal Navy (1968), Churchill said it shortly after he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.

With his new authority, Churchill had ordered the British fleet to convert from coal to oil and was mothballing older ships in favor of smaller, faster ones.

A disgruntled Admiral indignantly told Churchill he was scuttling the tradition of the Royal Navy. Gretton wrote that Churchill answered:

       “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”

Despite these oft-cited anecdotes, it appears that Winston Churchill never said any version of the naval tradition quote.

According to a post on the website of the Churchill Centre and Museum in London, Churchill told his personal assistant Anthony Montague-Browne that he never uttered such words.

Montague-Browne confirmed this to Richard Langworth, one of the most respected Churchill biographers.

In his great book about Churchill quotations and misquotes, Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations, Langworth says that Montague-Browne personally told him that he had asked Churchill about the quote.

According to Montague-Browne, Churchill responded: “I never said it. I wish I had.”

Langworth notes that “rum, sodomy and the lash” is similar to “rum, bum and bacca” — a catchphrase from an old saying about the, er, pastimes of British sailors, dating back to the 1800s:

     “Ashore it’s wine, women and song; aboard it’s rum, bum and concertina.” (Bum = a man’s rear end; bacca = tobacco.)

At any rate, it seems that attributing a quotation about rum, sodomy and the lash to Winston Churchill is nothing but an old British naval tradition.

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