'Prove Me Wrong': CBS News Anchor Jane Pauley Said She Coined This Common Phrase

Jane Pauley has already cemented her place as one of the most well-known faces in the American morning-show canon. However, the TV veteran is choosing a particularly niche hill to die on, asking for acknowledgment and the historical record to reflect that she may have handed English one of its most-used throwaway lines. You see, Pauley believes the expression "bad hair day" is something she and her co-host, Bryant Gumbel, invented on "Today" sometime in the early '80s. 

When asked in a Time interview head-on whether she had a hand in coming up with the phrase, she said: "Prove me wrong. Bryant Gumbel and I were talking about my bad hair days on the 'Today' show regularly in the early '80s. If I had two good hair days out of five, it was great, and Garry put the phrase 'bad hair day' in 'Doonesbury.' He got it from his wife." The wife in question is Pauley herself, and the "Doonesbury" being a comic strip created in the '70s by Garry Trudeau. He and Pauley have been married for decades. Pauley also brought up The New York Times columnist William Safire's attempt to find the roots of the phrase, only managing to trace it back to print in the '80s.

Now, Pauley's account sounds reasonably airtight given the timeframe, but if you ask the people who keep the actual receipts on the English language, they'll tell you the ledger contains a different story.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary entry on "bad hair day," the phrase's earliest invocation traces back to the early '70s, appearing in a Michigan paper called The State Journal. Furthermore, Word Histories corroborates that the earliest usage traces to an ad in said paper. "When your hair gets too expressive, it usually results in a condition called 'a bad hair day,'" the paper reads. The solution, naturally, being a trip to the designated barbershop that placed the ad.

Then there's also 1992's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which might have contributed to the phrase's mainstream explosion with Buffy's "I'm fine, but you're obviously having a bad hair day" line to Amilyn. Where Jane Pauley of "Today" fame factors into this history is anyone's guess. As far as coining the phrase is concerned, we have ample evidence that it originated a decade before Pauley first said it on morning TV.

Whoever originally came up with that specific combination of words, it's worth noting that what brings us together is our shared anguish over the problem. Bad hair is the great undoer of an otherwise chic style. It ruins our best days and doesn't bargain — not even with people like the royals whose hair mistakes have never gone unnoticed. Peasant or princess, hair humbles us all. In fact, for the ultimate proof of that, look no further than all the gorgeous celebrities whose looks were ruined because their hair refused to cooperate on that particular outing.