Meaning
A proverbial encouragement to optimism: when misfortune or setbacks arrive, convert them into something worthwhile rather than dwelling on the loss. Usually quoted in full, and typically wry, consoling, or rallying rather than solemn. Warmly encouraging, though by now often jokingly cliched when offered as comfort. Regional use: General English (American origin).
Origin
The saying grew out of early-1900s American slang in which 'handing someone a lemon' meant passing off a dud or inflicting a setback. Quote Investigator traces the earliest known print to an anonymous poem in the Kalispell Bee of Montana (May 23, 1907): 'And if you get a lemon, why, Just make the lemonade', followed by a December 1907 Biddeford Journal quip defining an optimist as a man who makes lemonade of the lemons handed him. Elbert Hubbard was using his lemonade-stand version in The Philistine by July 1908, was quoted to that effect in the Literary Digest in January 1909, and reused the image in his 1915 obituary for the actor Marshall P. Wilder; Dale Carnegie's 1948 bestseller How to Stop Worrying and Start Living carried the saying to mass audiences, though he credited Julius Rosenwald for it. No originator is known: the phrase was circulating anonymously by 1907, so the Hubbard and Carnegie attributions are popularizations rather than coinages, and the '1909 obituary' sometimes cited is really the 1909 Digest quotation of Hubbard; the obituary belongs to 1915.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- if life gives you lemons, make lemonade
- make lemonade out of lemons
- turn lemons into lemonade
- when life hands you lemons, make lemonade
Usage Examples
- Losing that client freed her evenings for the certification course; when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
- He treated the redundancy as seed money for the workshop he had always wanted, in the spirit of turning lemons into lemonade.
- If life hands you lemons, make lemonade: the storm canceled the hall booking, so they married in the garden instead.