I say it's spinach

I say it's spinach (sometimes given in full as I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it or further abbreviated to just spinach) is a twentieth-century American idiom with the approximate meaning of "nonsense" or "rubbish". It is usually spoken or written as an anapodoton, thus only first part of the complete phrase ("I say it's spinach") is given to imply the second part, which is what is actually meant: "I say the hell with it."

The phrase originated as the caption of a gag cartoon published in The New Yorker on December 8, 1928. Drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E. B. White, the cartoon shows a modern bourgeois mother at table trying to convince her young daughter to eat her vegetable, the dialogue being

(Broccoli was a relative novelty at that time, just then being widely introduced by Italian immigrant growers to the tables of East Coast cities.)

What White called "the spinach joke" quickly became one of the New Yorker cartoon captions to enter the vernacular (Peter Arno's "" and Peter Steiner's "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" being other examples), becoming a of the 1930s, with continued, though diminishing, use into the early 21st century. For instance, Alexander Woolcott in his 1934 collection While Rome Burns: "This eruption of reticence... will, I am sure, be described by certain temperaments as an exercise in good taste. I do not myself so regard it. I say it's spinach.") At the first awards ceremony of the New York Drama Critics' Circle in 1936, Percy Hammond of the New York Herald Tribune gave a speech dissenting from the choice of Maxwell Anderson's Winterset as the Best Play winner, calling it "spinach, and I say to hell with it." Elizabeth Hawles titled her 1938 autobiographical critique and exposé of the fashion industry Fashion is Spinach and made her meaning clear by reproducing Rose and White's cartoon following the title page.S. J. Perelman titled a 1944 story for the Saturday Evening Post "Dental or Mental, I Say It’s Spinach".

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