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	이상도

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바로 그거야!

"바로 그거야"를 영어로 하면

That/'s (just) the ticket.
That/'s right.
That/'s [what we need].

등으로 나타낼 수 있습니다.

Rickety Tickety Savvee.

Dear Word Detective: I have been puzzled recently by the reappearance of a phrase from my past: "Yeah...That's the ticket!", spoken in a small whiny voice with an up-turned finish. My memory tells me that this phrase was part of an old cartoon from the 40s or 50s, perhaps Bugs Bunny. Or maybe it's from an old gangster film or The Three Stooges. I'm not even sure exactly where to look it up. Please help. -- Joanne West, Dallas, Texas.

I, too, seem to remember hearing Bugs Bunny say "that's the ticket," meaning "that's right" or "that's what we need," in several cartoons, and I think Abbott and Costello also used the phrase occasionally. In any case, we don't have to worry about pinning down exactly which Hollywood icon coined "that's the ticket," because the phrase first showed up in England around 1834, long before movies and TV were invented.

There's quite a bit of debate as to the origin of "that's the ticket." One theory maintains that it's actually a corruption of the French phrase "c'est l'etiquette," meaning "that's the proper thing or course of action." The mutation of an unfamiliar or foreign word into a more familiar word ("etiquette" into "the ticket") is not uncommon in slang, but there doesn't seem to be any direct evidence for such a shift in this case.

More plausible theories about "that's the ticket" take it literally and propose various "tickets" to which the phrase could logically refer. A political "ticket," a party's roster of candidates for office, is one possibility. Or it might refer to tickets given out to the poor by charities in the 19th century, which were redeemable for soup. This theory is given some support by the existence of the similar phrase "that's the ticket for soup," cited by slang expert Eric Partridge as existing in the mid-19th century.

"That's the ticket" might also logically refer to a winning lottery ticket, a possibility that would certainly match the "that's the right answer" or "that's what we need" sense of the term.