"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/09/17(blockbuster)

I have to thank Paul Antony Jones, who wrote a treat book called The Accidential Dictionary that I like delving into from time to time, and he remindede me about one particular word which we bandly about these days, but which actually has a quite dark history to it. These days, when a film fails to earn any money at the box office, we tend to call it's a bomb, but if it's really successful, we call it a blockbuster, which is still literally a bomb, and the reason why is it takes us back to wartime and Britain at the height of the Second Wold War. This is when the Royal Air Force began developing a new design for a huge aerial bomb. It called the high capacity or HC bomb. It took a long time to develope, but when it did emerge, it was nine feet long, the first one in 1941. Half a tonne of steel and weighted a total of 4000lb. If that's not enough, a staggering tree-quarters of that was made of pure explosive amatol, so one of the most explosive materials around. And on the 31-st of March, 1941, the first of ones was dropped in an air raid of the city of Emden, that's in north-west Germany, and one of the pilotes involved in the raid described, quite sadly, how whole houses took to the air. Then war intensified, the neeb for bigger, greater bombs emerged, and by the end of the war, more than 12000 HCs had been dropped on German targets. To the RAF pilots, there were simply called cookies, and there is a tradition of calling bombs sort of quite affectionate names, really, Big Berthas or... It's quite a strange thing, I suppose a little bit a black humour, but it was the Americans who decided to call them blockbusters because they were so huge that they could literally destroy an entire block, and thanks to American wartime reporters, that crapt into English lexicon and it's stayed there ever since, thankfuly not to describe bombs so much, but to describe anything that makes a massive impact.