"Long as I'm yours, long as you're mine/Long as there's love and a moon to shine/I say it's spinach and the hell with it/The hell with it, that's all!". Gammon and spinach In Britain in the 19th century, "spinach" also meant "nonsense". This is presumably coincidence, with an entirely different origin for the 19th century meaning. Dickens uses the phrase "gammon and spinach" in this sense with Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield (published in 1849) saying "What a world of gammon and spinnage it is though, ain't it!" ("spinnage" being a now-obsolete variant of "spinach"). The same phrase, although with unclear meaning, is also seen in the nursery rhyme "A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go" ("With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach/heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley"). The 1989 second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists these two close senses as letters below the same number in the entry for "spinach". Cassell's Dictionary of Slang gives just the American sense (but listed as extant 1900–1950) while conversely Partridge gives only the British, perhaps echoing the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary which also does so. 2015 Hafeez cartoon In its 6 August 2015 issue, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez that called back to the 87-year-old cartoon. A young girl and her mother are in a therapist's office, with the caption, "You said, and I quote, 'I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it.' Why don't we start there?" References American English idioms Editorial cartoons Quotations from comics Comedy catchphrases 1920s neologisms Works originally published in The New Yorker