Not so much

‘Kiss me mucho,’ sang my husband with a revolting leer, ‘and we’ll soar. And we’ll dance the dance of love forevermore.’

I poured myself a whisky in a vain attempt to catch up, and returned to my task.

Not so much was the subject of my researches, and I soon wondered why it had only recently begun to annoy me.

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Simon Cook

Pensioners have never had it so good

It qualifies as a catchphrase, I think, though some dictionaries of slang list it too. Much has been very productive of slang. Ben Jonson had characters exclaiming ‘Much!’ and meaning ‘not much’, 400 years ago. Contrariwise, since the second world war, Not much! has been used to contradict a statement such as ‘I seldom drink’. Muchly has served as a humorous formulation for the past century or so, and by the 1970s was looked upon as a camp element in language.