Mental Floss

Where Does the Phrase ‘How Do You Like Them Apples’ Come From?

The phrase made famous by ‘Good Will Hunting’ is much older than the 1997 film—and doesn’t have anything to do with actual apples.

No apples were harmed in the popularizing of this phrase.
No apples were harmed in the popularizing of this phrase. | Britt Erlanson/The Image Bank/Getty Images

In the 1997 hit film Good Will Hunting, local guy Chuckie (Ben Affleck) walks up to a Harvard student at the bar and tells her remembers her from his history class. The audience knows it’s a lie—Chuckie is a working man who never went to college, let alone an Ivy League school—but the girl doesn’t. That is, until cocky grad student Clark comes over and puts Chuckie on the spot. 

“History?” he asks. “Just ‘history’? It must have been a survey course, then.” 

Clark laughs at Chuckie’s expense, but his move backfires when Chuckie’s friend Will (Matt Damon) comes to the rescue. Although he’s a janitor and an ex-con, Will is secretly a self-taught genius capable of reading the densest, most cerebral academic books in under an hour, and his knowledge of Clark’s forte, economics, sends the grad student running with his tail between his legs. 

After the girl, Skylar (Minnie Driver), gives Will her number, the genius goes after Clark to deliver the final blow. Holding up the piece of paper to his face, he delivers one of the most iconic and memorable lines from the entire film: “How do ya like them apples?!” 

Although Good Will Hunting is widely credited for embedding this ubiquitous phrase into the American vernacular, it’s far from the first film to feature this snappy line of dialogue.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the colloquial phrase as being similar to “how do you like that?,” and notes that it is “frequently used as a jeer or taunt, implying that the thing referred to will be unwelcome.”

As journalist Guy Howie notes in the film magazine Far Out, Jack Nicholson’s character in Chinatown (1974) used the same words to taunt one of his adversaries. Screenwriter Robert Towne, in turn, might have gotten the phrase from Howard Hawks’s 1959 western Rio Bravo, in which the characters are tossing “toffee apple” bombs at one another. 

Howie suggests how do you like them apples may have originated around the First World War, when British “toffee apple” bombs—a small, long-range projectile shot from a 2-inch mortar—were invented. However, the OED cites sources that are older still. “I knew them better and saw them in action more often than ‘Mr. Smith,’” someone told a reporter from the Oakland Tribune in 1941, “How do like them apples, Smithy old boy?”

The OED found the first-known use of the phrase all the way back in 1895, in a September issue of Texas’s Bryan Eagle: “Bryan is the best cotton market in this section of the state and has received more cotton than any other town in this section. How do you like ‘them apples’?”

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