<u+201c>this election can be well understood as the revenge of flyover country,<u+201d> sen. ted cruz told the federalist society<u+2019>s national lawyer convention last week. in his speech, the texas senator painted the election of donald trump as <u+201c>an incredible vindication for the american people across this country, and especially those as you know in rural america, in what elites on both coasts consider to be <u+2018>flyover country.<u+2019><u+201d> but how did the <u+201c>flyover country<u+201d> epithet come to be bestowed by those coastal elites? some new research reveals that the phrase originated in an earlier idiom popular among television executives in the 1970s, shuttling back and forth on flights between new york and los angeles. peter reitan, who tracks word origins on his early sports and pop culture history blog , discovered one precursor: <u+201c>people we fly over.<u+201d> that phrasing shows up as early as august 1970, in a newswire story about <u+201c>the mary tyler moore show,<u+201d> which was set to premiere that fall. <u+201c>we<u+2019>re not doing the show for mid-america,<u+201d> the sitcom<u+2019>s creator, james l. brooks, told the press . mr. brooks <u+201c>suggested then that <u+2018>mid-america<u+2019> was a figure of speech; that in hollywood it<u+2019>s cute to say, <u+2018>middle america is the people we fly over,<u+2019><u+201d> the article stated. the expression <u+201c>people we fly over<u+201d> got attributed to nameless tv executives in several newspaper articles throughout the <u+2019>70s. a 1978 los angeles times article cited james aubrey, president of cbs from 1959 to 1965, using the phrase to encourage the industry to pay more attention to middle america, rather than dismiss it. but the dismissive attitude took hold, as the idiom evolved into <u+201c>flyover country.<u+201d> a book published in january 1980, donald bowie <u+2019>s <u+201c>station identification: confessions of a video kid,<u+201d> put it into print. in the book, mr. bowie, who hails from a suburb of boston, mocks bobby goldsboro <u+2019>s sentimental 1968 song <u+201c>honey<u+201d> as <u+201c>suited for the national anthem of the flyover country.<u+201d> two months later, esquire magazine featured a profile of the painter russell chatham by his fellow montanan, thomas mcguane. <u+201c>because we live in flyover country, we try to figure out what is going on elsewhere by subscribing to magazines,<u+201d> mr. mcguane wrote. when the oxford english dictionary added <u+201c>flyover country<u+201d> in a 2013 online update, mr. mcguane<u+2019>s article was cited as the first known use. but as he told national geographic recently , he picked up the turn of phrase from working in hollywood. <u+201c>this must have come from the time i worked in movies, an industry that seemed to acknowledge only two places, new york and los angeles,<u+201d> mr. mcguane said. while bicoastal types in the entertainment industry may have been initially responsible for the <u+201c>flyover<u+201d> put-down, the expression now typically gets used in a rhetorically defensive way, just as mr. cruz applied it. relatively few people on the coasts may ever actually refer to <u+201c>flyover country,<u+201d> and yet it persists as an anti-elitist figure of speech to combat perceived threats to the american heartland.
after the election, the concept of <u+2018>flyover country<u+2019> rises - wsj
ben zimmer