Why did the OED reject ‘it’s all bananas’ from the Gershwin song?
Wordhunters found evidence of the word bananas in the 1930 Gershwin song But Not For Me in the line “It’s all bananas”. But the OED rejected this for being the wrong sense of the word. But have Wordhunters discovered an entirely new meaning for bananas worthy of a mention in the OED? John Simpson, OED Chief Editor: It’s sometimes claimed that we collect more instances of words and meanings that don’t make it into the OED than we do for terms that do finally find a place in the dictionary. The problem with these excluded terms is that there simply isn’t enough documentary evidence available to be sure that they have (or had) a significant place in the language. English is full of outliers or borderline cases, which sparkle for a moment and then disappear, leaving no appreciable effect on the language. This was the case with the Gershwin example. We identified instantly that it wasn’t an early example of bananas in the sense ‘mad, crazy’, which was the sense we were looking for. So was t
