Where did the expression 'playing the world's smallest violin' come from?
Learn English – Where did the expression ‘playing the world’s smallest violin’ come from
catch-phrasesetymology
Related Solutions
From Etymonline:
doggone 1851, Amer.Eng., a "fantastic perversion of god-damned" [Weekley]. But Mencken favors the theory that it is "a blend form of dog on it; in fact it is still often used with it following. It is thus a brother to the old English phrase, 'a pox upon it,' but is considerably more decorous."
Others have it derived from the Scottish dagone, or "gone to the dogs," but there's a bit of debate about that.
From my own search, I found several pre-1851 uses. It looks like it may have first appeared in print in a British publication, albeit of an American vernacular dialog, in Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains by British explorer George Ruxton, 1847 (date check):
It subsequently appeard three times in 1848 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in articles written by Ruxton while living in America.
With regard to the song in which you heard it, the phrase has a double meaning. That's probably why you have the impression that it means too much. The song is Silverchair's Ana's Song (Open Fire) and it's about anorexia (ana is teencode for anorexia). The double meaning is "to the bone" as in deeply (see @Kiamlaluno's answer) as well as in the sense of the skin-and-bone appearance of an anorexic body.
Best Answer
Not being aware of the origin, I had to do a little searching and, to my amusement, came across a an entry on wiki.answers that references the A-Team using this in a T.V episode; you can check the link for complete text if you wish, but the following information is all we need to take from that article:
From there I found a answer I guess I could swallow. It stated that a variation of the phrase exists as "The world's Smallest Violin Playing Hearts and Flowers" - while that doesn't quite ring the same senses, it could go to explain the origins more plainly, namely by giving us a link to Theodore Moses Tobani:
As you can see, this also captures the usage in M*A*S*H too, which was apparently in 1978. The composition mentioned is from 1899 (according to this source, but 1893 according to Wikipedia), 1893 sounds like it might be the earliest so far.