PLEASE MAKE YOUR DONATION TODAY!
You Can Help Drastically Shorten FReepathons by Donating Monthly!
VERY Generous FReeper Sponsors are donating $10 for every New Monthly Donor!
Please Sign Up to Donate Monthly!
1994:”A hard-edged question was posed to Hillary Rodham Clinton at her Whitewater news conference: what about “the suggestion in the R.T.C. memorandum . . . you and your husband knew or should have known that Whitewater was not cash-flowing and that notes or debts should have been paid”?
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda,” the First Lady replied. “We didn’t.”...............
Taken together, the term means “Spare me the useless excuses.” I reached Mrs. Clinton through her aides, each of whom was surprised at the good-natured nature of my follow-up question, to get her definition. Mrs. Clinton passes the word that she heard the expression often in Arkansas, and interprets it to mean:
“People can tell you that you should have, or could have, or would have, but the question is: Did you or didn’t you?”...............
The shoulda, coulda, woulda phrase (accepting Mrs. Clinton’s order as standard) has a wistfully resigned connotation that was evoked in 1854 by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier in “Maud Muller”:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/15/magazine/on-language-shoulda-coulda-woulda.html
I remember my mom using that phrase, always in the context of some mistake or lapse of judgement on my part!