Eggcorn Forum

A “johnny come lately” is a newcomer, someone who recently got on the bandwagon. Presumably the idiom is an extension of the phrase “a come-lately,” referring to someone who has just arrived. This specific sense of “lately,” meaning “recently” or “not long since,” has been around since at least the fifteenth century. “Johnny come lately” is American slang, coined in the early nineteenth century. It’s still a popular phrase-over a quarter of a million hits on Google.

About a hundred of these web sites use the phrase “Johnny come later.” Many of them appear to use the revised phrase in the same sense as the source idiom and are probably simple mishearings of “Johnny come lately.” But a few of the sites seem to turn the idiom to a slightly different meaning, based, I think, on their substitution of “later” (after now) for “lately” (recently).

Here’s someone commenting on Canada’s slow response to the 2005 Turkish earthquake: (http://tinyurl.com/5nmgz2):

“When the Government of Canada dispatched the military’s DART Unit, or Disaster Advanced Response Team, (the joke is in the name) they turned [Canada] into the johnny-come-later water boys of international rescue rather than the leaders in international mutual aide rescue….”

While the response team could conceivably have been the most recent arrivals at the earthquake scene, the writer seems to have in mind their tardiness rather than how recently they had showed up. They “came later” than the other teams.

On a political soapbox forum (http://hotair.com/archives/2006/11/04/h … kerrygate/) a poster writes that

“Kerry could have ended the issue in 5 seconds if her had said, right then and there, what his johnny-come-later apologistas are trying to insert inside his flapping lips….”

The Democratic spin doctors were “johnny come laters” not because they recently got on board the Kerry cause but because the proffered their explanations after the gaffe.

A reviewer on a PC game review site criticizes a cheaply made rule manual included in the box with the game (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13103.phtml):

“I can see the advantage that they can change rulebooks and update the pack relatively quickly but the other side of that coin is that the early adopter spent $60, for an out of dated rulebook, while Johnny come later now has the final word on the rules.”

The people who buy a box with the updated rule book are “johnny come laters” because they bought the game after the early adopters.