There’s nothing quite like merrily rolling along in life, feeling confident that you’ve been using a certain phrase correctly, only to find out you've been mishearing it all along.
That's how listener Evan Harris felt after seeing Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway: "In the show they mention the 'movers and shapers,' [and] while this makes intrinsic sense, I always heard the phrase as 'movers and shakers.' Are there different uses of this that I was unaware of? Or have I just been mishearing it for my entire life?"
If you're panicking now, thinking how you too have always heard the phrase as "movers and shakers," don't worry. That is indeed the original phrase. However, in the song “Our Time” from Merrily We Roll Along, there’s a line that says, “We’re the movers, and we’re the shapers / We’re the names in tomorrow’s papers.” Using "shapers" instead of "shakers" isn't about a shift a meaning, so much as it as finding a word to rhyme with "papers."
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “mover and shaker” as a person who “initiates events and influences people. A dynamic and influential person.” The phrase was first coined in 1873, when Arthur O'Shaughnessy used it in his poem Ode:
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
The phrase popped up in the language from time to time following the publication of this poem. For example, the heiress and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan used "Movers and Shakers" as the title of her 1936 memoir. It didn't really start getting popular until the 1960s though. Interestingly, it's almost always used in the plural form, though "mover and shaker" is in use.
To hear more about “movers and shakers” including some variants, listen to the audio above.
