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Mind your language

How ‘Not even a thing’ became a thing

From Alfred the Great to Kim Kardashian

6 February 2016

9:00 AM

6 February 2016

9:00 AM

Last summer Kim Kardashian, who already had a daughter called North (surname West), announced that she was expecting a boy. She put a photograph on Twitter of herself pouting, captioning it: ‘Pregnancy lips’. Some Twitter-followers asked: ‘Pregnancy lips? Is that even a thing?’

The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has since adopted that example as the locus classicus of the phrase Is that even a thing?, and variants such as Is that a thing? or That’s not a thing.

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