Rose's Turn of Phrase: A Linguistic Exploration of 'Coming Up Roses,' from Gypsy, with Three Linguists

In 1958, the up-and-coming composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim was in need of a phrase.

He was working on the lyrics for the musical Gypsy, specifically for the moment when the indomitable stage mother Momma Rose vows to channel all her ambition and unfulfilled dreams into her elder daughter.

The phrase would have to succinctly express “Things are going better than ever” while also serving as a neat lyrical refrain. As Sondheim told biographer Meryle Seacrest, "one of the problems was to come up with a phrase ... that isn't flat and yet isn't so poetic that you can't believe that Rose with her street jargon would say it."

And, naturally, the phrase would need to sit neatly on the musical notes that had been provided by the composer Jule Style: a see-sawing melody that suggested something of Rose's stubbornness and fervor.

As he revealed in his book Finishing the Hat, it took Sondheim a week of solid contemplation to come up with the elegant solution:

Things look swell, things look great
Gonna have the whole world on a plate
Starting here, starting now
Honey, everything's coming up roses.

Sondheim was proud of the phrase which, as we know, would give the song from Gypsy its title. He was even more pleased when, years later, he realized that his floral expression had taken root (so to speak) in the language: In 1968, he said, he encountered the lead sentence of a New York Times editorial, “Everything is not coming up roses in Vietnam.” Earlier usages of Sondheim's phrase exist, including the headline for a 1962 article, also in the Times, about a garden center in Miami Beach.

Lately, Audra McDonald, playing Rose in the current revival of Gypsy at the Majestic Theatre, has been whamming out that phrase—a string of words that's so common today that most theatergoers are likely unaware that the show itself gave rise to it. (The song will also feature in the upcoming revue Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends.)

Sondheim's brilliance and meticulousness with language was at the heart of his work. It partly explains why, in June 2024, a collection of the man's thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries fetched $25,600 at auction. But while his dazzling rhymes are widely celebrated (every appreciation of Sondheim's wordsmithery has to mention the fact he rhymed "personable" with "coercin' a bull"), his success as a neologist warrants further consideration.

“It sounds like it’s existed forever,” linguist John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University and host of the podcast Lexicon Valley, said of the phrase. “You would think that people had been saying that in 1745. It’s astonishing in that way. That is definitely another part of Sondheim's genius.”

Sondheim's proverbial botanical event remains an especially popular go-to for headline writers. Every other day it seems it’s coming up roses for something or other—in the last few months, I’ve seen it used in reference to the Chicago Bulls, the Hawk Tuah girl, the Golden Bachelorette, Jessica Chastain’s facial spray, Jar Jar Binks, the Democratic Party (the song was played at Harris campaign rallies) and Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, it's a popular phrase with florists and fashionistas, as well as a common cocktail name.

Fans of The Simpsons are undoubtedly familiar with Milhouse Van Houten's dweeby, self-referencing take on the phrase.

As Urban Dictionary notes, the phrase lends itself remarkably well to sarcasm, to imply things are going terribly, a rhetorical device known as antiphrasis. (For example, "I flew all the way to New York just to see Gypsy during Christmas break, but all the performances are canceled. Everything's coming up roses.")

Troubled singer-songwriter Elliott Smith used the phrase as the title of the sixth track on his self-titled second album. In Smith's hands, it suggests anything but optimism. In fact, there's reason to believe that what Smith had in mind was a figure of speech common with drug users: coming up roses as a description of the moment when blood flashes into the syringe.

Coming up roses also comes up in another musical revival this season—in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, when the ambitious screenwriter Joe Gillis discusses his faltering career:

If this didn’t come up roses
I’d be covering funerals
Back in Dayton, Ohio.

How to explain that Joe Gillis, in a story set in 1959/1960, employs a phrase that was coined nearly a decade later? Well, obviously, Norma Desmond and Momma Rose exist in the same theatrical universe.

“Being the title of a very famous song will have helped it to spread as a phrase—though we probably want to thank Ethel Merman for that as much as Sondheim,” said Lynne Murphy, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex.

Interestingly, the idiom has "mutated," said Murphy. "Now people also say things like Everything's roses. We don't just know Everything's coming up roses as an unchangeable set phrase—we can be creative and do new idiomatic things with it.”

It's also not unusual for song lyrics to spread idioms or slang. "The first thing to come to mind is up, up and away. People said up and away before the 5th Dimension's 'My Beautiful Balloon' but they started saying up, up and away after it. Songs get repeated a lot and they're catchy!" After coming up roses, perhaps the next most widely used idiom to have originated on a Broadway stage is Don't rain on my parade, from Funny Girl—another Jule Style musical, this time with lyrics by Bob Merrill.

As Dan Pugh, co-host of the word history podcast Bunny Trails, points out, with coming up roses, Sondheim was riffing on the widely understood figurative sense of 'roses'—as in, bed of roses or come up smelling like roses. “The word ‘roses’ was commonly used to express a favorable circumstance or to describe success since at least the 1800s,” he said.

One of the earliest recorded instances of that usage dates from 1832's The East India Sketch-Book Volume I, in which Elizabeth Elton Smith wrote, “Life is not all roses!"

When it comes to the use of the phrase in Gypsy, there's some speculation—I'm looking at you, unsourced assertion on Wikipedia—that coming up roses is a pun, as in, “everything’s going Rose’s way".

On the other hand, Sondheim did say the rose/Rose connection was purely coincidental. As Sondheim was fond of relating, the director Jerome Robbins' reaction to the phrase was: “Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?” Sondheim assured him no reasonable person would take it that way.

McWhorter is inclined to believe that no pun was intended. “Since linking it to ‘Rose’ would have been so clever, we have to give him credit for disavowing what would yield a compliment," he said. "There is a poetic, almost erudite reading that way that makes sense—but only in the way you read a Shakespearean sonnet or Catullus. Basically, we can be sure no audience member ever thinks of that ‘Rose’ connection. I never did until reading about it. I just saw the Audra revival today and really, there’s no way anyone was thinking that lyric referred to the character.”

Of course, with A Little Night Music, Sondheim would coax the phrase send in the clowns out of the circus ring and into popular parlance. And, while he mightn't have coined ladies who lunch, he certainly helped popularize it in his lyrics for Company.

But coming up roses was clearly his triumph, idiomatically speaking.

None of this, probably, will enhance anyone's enjoyment of Gypsy. But, for appreciators of Sondheim's genius, there’s a modicum of pleasure to be derived from knowing that, with a few strokes of his Blackwing pencil, the great man left his mark on the English language, and the minds of those who speak it, with a phrase that’s as delectable and useful as it is utterly singable.