So this led me down a fun trail! When I first saw this, I assumed that it was, in fact, an old saying, though I'd never heard it before, so I went to look it up. Wikisource, which is usually quite good to find old turns of phrase in, yielded nothing, and looking up the phrase itself taught me that it appears in Repo! The Genetic Opera, in the song "Thankless Job". I still wanted to be sure, so I searched through Dreamwidth's archives, and found some instances of the phrase, with a large clump around 2008, the year the film came out. I did find one instance from 2006, but as it turns out, the film was adapted from a musical that came out in 2002, so it might well have come from there, or it might be that the person came up with it independently.
In any case, I am quite sure the saying is derived from that film, and that it's not really that old!
no subject
So this led me down a fun trail! When I first saw this, I assumed that it was, in fact, an old saying, though I'd never heard it before, so I went to look it up. Wikisource, which is usually quite good to find old turns of phrase in, yielded nothing, and looking up the phrase itself taught me that it appears in Repo! The Genetic Opera, in the song "Thankless Job". I still wanted to be sure, so I searched through Dreamwidth's archives, and found some instances of the phrase, with a large clump around 2008, the year the film came out. I did find one instance from 2006, but as it turns out, the film was adapted from a musical that came out in 2002, so it might well have come from there, or it might be that the person came up with it independently.
In any case, I am quite sure the saying is derived from that film, and that it's not really that old!