It was used by Stephen Crane at least four times in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: 1893).
Visiting a museum, our heroine utters, ‘Dis is outa sight.’ She could have been speaking 70 years later.
Category: Literary
Literary
The phrase ‘never-never land’ is linked to a creation of the Scottish playwright Sir James Barrie. In Barrie’s play Peter Pan, first produced in 1904, Peter befriends the real-world children of the Darling family and spirits them off for a visit to Never Land, where children can fly and never have to become adults. In his 1908 play When Wendy Grew Up, Barrie changed the name to Never Never Land, perhaps influenced by already existing ‘never-never’ terms, such as Australia’s ‘never-never country’ (for its sparsely populated desert interior). Even before that, however, people had already begun to refer to a place that was overly idealistic or romantic as a ‘never-never land.’
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Malapropisms
Named after the character Miss Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, a malapropism is any well-intended saying that takes on a different and often ludicrous meaning when a similar yet utterly inappropriate word is used. To wit: ‘He is the very pineapple of politeness.’
T. Hall (1660): Funebria Flore. – “If you throw enough dirt against the wall, some of it is bound to stick.”
Harington (1618) Epigrams: ‘That he might scant trust him so farre as throw him.’