HA! After reading this term "Jump the Shark" several times recently on FR and being too lazy for a while to look it up, I finally
googled it and gotJump The Shark
When a television show jumps the shark it has reached the peak of quality and will steadily decline ever after. Jumping the shark is the defining moment when you know your favorite TV show will never be the same again.
The phrase is a reference to the 1970s television show Happy Days. On 20 September 1977, the show aired an episode where the character Fonzie jumps a shark tank on water skis. A cliffhanger episode, many fans of the show consider this episode to be the high point of the popular show.
The phrase jump the shark, however, appears some years later. On 24 December 1997 the website www.jumptheshark.com went up on the net. It listed TV shows and the episodes where they jumped the shark. The site gives credit for the phrase to a Sean J. Connelly, who allegedly coined it in 1985. Connelly was the college roommate of site's creator, Jon Hein.
Never knew that. I remember that Happy Days episode. Too funny.
I wasn't sure what it meant beyond it being bar for Kerry as in a turning point or negative watershed.
I am always interested in finding out the true meaning of old sayings. Two interesting ones come to mind that I have researched before:
1) "Rule of Thumb": Commonly used to indicate something as being a common sense rule or logic. It's true meaning comes from and old English law that made it legal to beat ones wife with a switch as long as the switch was no bigger than your thumb.
2) "Whole nine yards": Commonly used to signify that you have given something everything you have to give. It comes from a WWII warplane - cant' remember which one specifically - that carried 27 feet of ammunition for each of it's guns. When they returned home empty the pilots would say "I gave'em the whole nine yards."