• The first blockbuster

  It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly, in the 1920s a blockbuster was ‘a movie whose long line of customers could not be contained on a single city block’. But with Google Books and online newspaper archives it’s easy to disprove this etymology: blockbuster does not appear before 1942 and then it referred to a bomb which was so big it could destroy a whole city block.

  tags: WW2 weapons

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