Buzz
In the 1997 blockbuster Good Will Hunting, Chuckie (Ben Affleck), a local guy, approaches a Harvard student at a bar and claims to remember her from a history class. The audience knows it’s a fabrication—Chuckie is a blue-collar worker who never attended college, especially not an Ivy League institution. However, the girl remains unaware until Clark, a smug grad student, intervenes and exposes Chuckie.
“History?” Clark questions. “Just ‘history’? It must have been a general course, then.”
Clark mocks Chuckie, but his plan backfires when Will (Matt Damon), Chuckie’s friend, steps in. Despite being a janitor and former convict, Will is a hidden prodigy who can absorb complex academic material in minutes. His expertise in economics, Clark’s specialty, leaves the grad student humiliated and retreating.
After Skylar (Minnie Driver) shares her number with Will, the genius confronts Clark to deliver the knockout punch. Waving the paper in his face, Will utters one of the most legendary lines from the movie: “How do ya like them apples?!”
While Good Will Hunting is often credited with popularizing this phrase in American culture, it wasn’t the first film to include this sharp retort.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase is akin to “how do you like that?” and is often used as a taunt, suggesting the subject will be unwelcome or unfavorable.
As highlighted by journalist Guy Howie in Far Out, Jack Nicholson’s character in Chinatown (1974) used the same line to mock an opponent. Screenwriter Robert Towne may have borrowed it from Howard Hawks’s 1959 western Rio Bravo, where characters throw “toffee apple” bombs at each other.
Howie theorizes that the phrase might trace back to the First World War, when British “toffee apple” bombs—small, long-range mortars—were developed. However, the OED references even earlier uses, such as a 1941 quote from the Oakland Tribune: “I knew them better and saw them in action more often than ‘Mr. Smith.’ How do like them apples, Smithy old boy?”
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest recorded use of the phrase to 1895, in a September edition of Texas’s Bryan Eagle: “Bryan is the top cotton market in this region, receiving more cotton than any other town nearby. How do you like ‘them apples’?”
