Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

Today we're going to look at the hamster wheel versus the rat race, and then we'll look at

where Santa Claus got his many names.

Last week, Kevin called in from the big island of Hawaii to tell us about

hamster alert. A family elect, his dad would say, anytime someone in the family did something

silly or stupid, as in the hamster rides the wheel all day long going nowhere. And Kevin said he's

noticed more pop culture references to the term hamster wheel in the last couple of years.

So first, the real physical wheel that real hamsters run on started being a thing people got for pet hamsters in the 1940s.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a Los Angeles Times advertisement

for hamster wheels in 1949. But it's a small classified ad with no picture, so I think it's

fair to assume that the retailer expected potential customers to know what a hamster wheel was

at that point. The ad wasn't introducing a new concept, so hamster wheels existed pre-1949.

And for a long time, people only used the phrase for these real wheels. But sometime in the early

2000s, it took on the metaphorical meaning of running and getting nowhere in life or at work.

And that's when you see a sharp and consistent rise of the phrase in books that have been scanned by the Google Books project.

So Kevin isn't imagining it, although the increase goes back more than just a few years.

For example, Linda Fields' 2003 self-help book, Be Yourself, How to Relax and Take Control of

Your Life, included this line. The demands of the material world can keep us rushing about,

doing this and that, playing one role, and then another, until one day we can find ourselves

on a hamster's wheel, going round and round in circles and unable to get

off. And in 2007, publishers grabbed the concept for the title of a business book, The Hamster

Revolution, how to manage your email before it manages you. Then, in 2010, Dean Starkman, who at the time ran the business section for the

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