In the movie, Harvey, Dr. Sanderson has been sacked for having Veta locked up in the sanitarium, Chumley’s Rest, rather than her brother, Elwood. At this point, the director of Chumley’s Rest is out looking for Elwood and the following exchange occurs between Wilson, an attendant at Chumley’s Rest, Dr. Sanderson and Kelly, his nurse.
WILSON – Hey, any of the patients been actin’ up, Kelly?
KELLY – Everything’s just peachy.
WILSON – That’s good – when are you takin’ off, Doc?
SANDERSON – Right now – I was just waiting for Dr. Chumley to get back.
WILSON – Hey, wait a second. Didn’t Dr. Chumley come back here with that psycho?
More recently, sportinglife.com published an online story on January 19, 2011 about Michael Owen on defending his Real Madrid record. He did this by helping Wanderley Luxemburgo’s men to a 4-2 defeat of Barcelona at the Bernabeu. The headline read:
Everything Is Peachy For Goal Scorer Owen
Back on April 12, 1984 the Los Angeles Times reported on the 10-day-old strike by 3 unions against 32 major hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. The MGM Grand Hotel‘s spokesman, Bill Bray is quoted as saying, “We’re not saying everything is peachy. Everything is not peachy.” He went on to say that MGM Grand Hotel had been handing out a letter to guests saying that because of the current labor dispute, the MGM Grand Hotel was temporarily unable to provide guests with the level of service for which the MGM Grand Hotel was known.
Back on September 27, 1948 the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported on radio personality, Jim Hawthorne and a small town known in California known as Hawthorne situated not far from Hollywood.
City fathers of the little nearby town of Hawthorne, Calif., found themselves with all the headaches of a radio station, none of the profits and a peeve on for a screwball disk jockey also named Hawthorne. The problem lay in the fact that Jim Hawthorne opened up his half-hour show with, “This is Hawthorne.”
The list of complaints against Jim Hawthorne were numerous and included the following:
He’s even invented a new language built around the key-word “Hogan.” He’ll say: “I was driving my Hoganmobile around Pasa-hogan so I stopped at a drive-a-Hogan for a Hoganburger.”
His adjectives range from “keen” to “peachy keen” to “oh so peachy keen.”
The kids on his “net-to-net coastwork” eat it up. So, apparently, do the natives of Hawthorne who think their home town (pop. 16,000) has suddenly blossomed out with a local radio station.
The sad truth of the matter was that the town of Hawthorne didn’t have a radio station. But that didn’t deter Hawthorne from hiring a skywriter to splash “Tune in to Hawthorne’s show” across the sky which led to twice as many letters piling up in the town of Hawthorne, begging to know how businesses could buy a radio spot on Hawthorne’s radio station. The end result?
Disc-jockey Hawthorne, whose brainstorm upped his salary from $85 a week on a tiny station to four-figures with ABC network, thinks the whole thing is “peachy keen.” Hawthorne city officials have another word for it.
The Pittsburgh Press reported on a baseball game back on July 28, 1910. It recounted the story that “faith which keeps the horizon tinted with the amethyst and gold of romance, which fills the fields with fairy rings, which peoples the trees with dryads and the fountain with nymphs is, in this age of iron and steel and oil, a hard thing.” The focus of the story was on Outfielder Anderson of the Deep Haven, Michigan baseball team and the headline read:
Outfielder Anderson’s Peachy Catch
Idiomation was unable to find an earlier published version of peachy, however, the fact that it was used in a headline with the expectation that readers of the Pittsburg Press would understand what was meant by the word peachy indicates that it was already part of the vernacular at the time and therefore, dates back to at least 1900.
Historically Speaking 