Meaning
A formula for saying that something is not really difficult to understand or do - used to deflate excuses, complaint about complexity, or the mystique around a task. The joke, often lost, is that rocket science is the yardstick of difficulty and whatever is under discussion plainly is not it. Conversational and often mildly condescending; the shortened rocket-science-free zingers ('it's not exactly brain surgery') draw on the same yardstick family. Regional use: General English; American origin.
Origin
Rocket science itself is young: Word Histories traces the literal term, meaning the science of rockets and propulsion, to the Minneapolis Tribune of 9 December 1930, with Fritz von Opel predicting rocket planes carrying tourists. The figurative sense arrived in American sports journalism of the 1980s: Bob Ryan wrote in the Sun-Sentinel of 14 May 1985 that basketball coach Doug Moe did not believe in treating basketball as rocket science, and Ira Berkow joked in 1987 that race-track students were probably PhDs in rocket science. The earliest negative construction Word Histories found is Bill Lyon in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 25 July 1987: 'It may not be rocket science exactly, but .360 doesn't come about by accident'. Wiktionary records the settled idiom - hyperbolic, and chiefly used in the negative - with synonyms including brain surgery, and Thomas Friedman's 2007 New York Times line, 'This isn't rocket science. Government standards matter.'
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- it doesn't take rocket science
- not rocket science
- rocket science it is not
Usage Examples
- Filing the permit is not exactly rocket science, but the office had managed to get it wrong four years running.
- Grouting a shower is hardly rocket science, which the tutorial video announced every ninety seconds.
- 'Come on, it's not rocket science,' the coach said, 'you catch the ball first, then you run with it.'