Another citation from the OED suggests that by 1931 you could roll your eyes “lugubriously,” and in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Joe rolls his eyes “indifferently.” While this begins to approach today’s meaning, the old interpretation persisted at least as late as 1950, when Hank Penny’s 1950 song “Bloodshot Eyes” told of a fallen woman who would “roll those big brown eyes” to seduce a former flame. And some other meanings persisted, too: In Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are from 1963, the titular monsters “roll their terrible eyes.” (Another sort of eye roll, in which the eyes roll straight up and back into the head, is still used to signal a sort of orgasmic pleasure, such as after a good meal. It’s unclear if this looks anything like the eye rolls described by Shakespeare and Penny.)
But that same decade some people began rolling their eyes much like the politicians of today (and 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon). In Jim Thompson’s crime novel Pop. 1280 (1964), the narrator’s lover rolls her eyes at his excuses, saying “Oh, brother!” and “What a bull artist!” People seem to have really started rolling their eyes in the 1980s, and it was around that time that people began groaning about real eye-rollers. The New York Times language columnist William Safire traced the term to, coincidence or not, a previous discussion of budget deficits, prompted by Ronald Reagan’s defense spending.
- Oh, Please, by Forrest Wickman, Slate.com, January 15, 2013.
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