GLOOM AND DOOM

noun phrase Also in the form doom and gloom (Business World) (Politics) A feeling or expression of despondency about the future; a grim prospect, especially in political or financial affairs. Etymology: A quotation from the musical Finian's Rainbow (1947, turned into a film in 1968), in which Og the pessimistic leprechaun uses the rhyming phrase as a repeated exclamation: Doom and gloom...D-o-o-m and gl-o-o-m...I told you that gold could only bring you doom and gloom, gloom and doom. History and Usage: This allusive phrase was first picked up by US political commentators in the sixties (perhaps as a result of the popularity of Finian's Rainbow as a film) and was being used as an attributive phrase to describe any worrying or negative forecast by the seventies. In the early eighties it was perhaps particularly associated with economic forecasting and with the disarmament debate; the emphasis shifted in the second half of the eighties to the pessimistic forecasts of some environmentalists about the future of the planet. Both the nuclear and environmental uses influenced the formation of the word doomwatch (originally the name of a BBC television series) for any systematic observation of the planet designed to help avert its destruction. A person who makes a forecast of gloom and doom is a gloom-and-doomster. Amongst all the recent talk of doom and gloom one thing has been largely overlooked. Daily Telegraph 7 Nov. 1987, p. 18 When the grass isn't always greener: gloom and doom that foreign companies are getting ahead in IT is not only a British disease. headline in Guardian 17 Aug. 1989, p. 29