[Flash in the Pan]
The Long Life of a Fleeting Flintlock Failure
The Long Life of a Fleeting Flintlock Failure
AMONG THE HEADACHES facing Facebook—or Meta, as the social-media giant’s parent company is now known—is an affidavit by an anonymous whistleblower recently submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the Washington Post, the whistleblower recounts a statement by Facebook communications official Tucker Bounds in 2017, when the company was facing harsh scrutiny over accusations regarding Russian interference in the previous year’s elections.
“It will be a flash in the pan,” Mr. Bounds reportedly said. “Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move onto something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.” That purported prediction turned out to be wildly off the mark, as damaging revelations have continued to rock Facebook. The post-election controversy was no “flash in the pan”—an expression typically used for something that briefly catches people’s attention but has no long-term effects.
Like many idioms, “flash in the pan” has lingered long after the source of its literal meaning has faded from memory. Modern- day English speakers might guess that the common phrase has something to do with cooking food speedily in a stovetop pan. (Several cookbooks for stir-fries and the like use “flash in the pan” in their titles.)
Or you might think the expression has to do with prospectors sifting gravel in pans, hoping to find tiny pieces of gold. One latter-day gold prospector in Oklahoma recently told a local public radio station, “I got my first flash in the pan, seen a piece of gold and I was hooked.”
But “flash in the pan” predates the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century by almost 200 years. The phrase was originally related to the workings of muskets and other guns with flintlock mechanisms. The “pan” in such a firearm is the hollow part of the lock, which is primed with a small amount of gunpowder. After the powder ignites in the pan, the “flash” passes through a hole in the barrel leading to a combustion chamber that sets off the main powder charge. Sometimes the process fails, and there is merely a “flash in the pan” without the gun discharging.
A search for the phrase on the historical database Early English Books Online finds a flurry of examples starting in 1674, sometimes with “flash” used as a verb. A satirical pamphlet from that year called “The Women’s Petition Against Coffee” complained that men were too jittery from the then-new caffeinated drink to satisfy their wives: “Their ammunition is wanting; peradventure they present, but cannot give fire, or at least do but flash in the pan, instead of doing execution.”
Later that same year came “The Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee,” which claimed that consuming coffee in fact warded off male impotence “by drying up those crude flatulent humours, which otherwise would make us only flash in the pan.”
Meanwhile, in the American colonies, a Boston preacher named Joshua Moodey delivered a sermon that used “flash in the pan” in a more serious fashion, as part of an extended military metaphor on the “spiritual war” of “Christian soldiers.” “Sin and Satan will not be scared and frighted away,” Moodey warned, “nor made to fly with a mere flash in the pan.”
That figurative usage, with “flash” as a noun, caught on to refer to a sudden effort that lacks staying power, failing to deliver on a showy start. Even as gunpowder warfare has been forgotten, the metaphor has proved remarkably sturdy, maintaining the core meaning that emerged three and a half centuries ago. “Flash in the pan,” it’s safe to say, is no flash in the pan.
WORD ON THE STREET
BEN ZIMMER
Thanks, Buzz. This is fascinating. 
