One-hit Wonder - Other Uses

Other Uses

The term one-hit wonder is occasionally used to refer to an artist, other than a musical performer, who is best known for a single work. Examples in literature include Harper Lee's only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which sold 30 million copies; and author Joseph Heller, who wrote several novels, but is still best known for Catch-22. Margaret Mitchell never wrote another book after her first novel, Gone With the Wind, was a smash best-seller. The Eye of Argon, Jim Theiss' only work of fiction, is an unusual example: it is famous (or rather infamous) for its lack of quality. The term is also applied to the film industry: one such case lies in the career of actress Natasha Henstridge, who has yet to match the success of the 1995 film, Species. Classical composers such as Johann Pachelbel, who is known today almost solely for Pachelbel's Canon despite being very popular in his own time, are also sometimes described thus.

In the sports world, there are several athletes known to casual sports fans for one event in their careers. Examples include Bill Mazeroski, who is the only player in Major League Baseball history to end a seventh game of the World Series with a walk-off home run (however, Mazeroski is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, due primarily to his status as one of the greatest defensive infielders of all time); Paul Henderson, a Canadian ice hockey player who scored the deciding goal in the 1972 Summit Series; Mike Jones, who tackled Kevin Dyson at the one-yard line on the final play of Super Bowl XXXIV; and Jimmy Glass, an English football goalkeeper, who is remembered for scoring a goal in the last seconds of the final day of 1998-99 English Third Division that kept his club in The Football League. His subsequently released biography was titled One-Hit Wonder.

In drug culture, the term one-hit wonder is often applied to highly potent specific varieties of substances, such as certain strains of cannabis that require only one "hit" (a single inhalation of smoke), or a "hit" of LSD (a single dose), to achieve the desired psychoactive effects.

In the world of web analytics, one-hit wonder is used to describe a user who comes to a site from a search engine, views the piece of content he was searching for, and then leaves, never clicking an ad or engaging in any way with the site. The phenomenon is particularly germane with respect to publishers putting "paywalls" around content, and the recent struggles of news and newspaper publishers in the face of changes brought about by the Internet. The term was first used in this respect by web programmer Tim Burden on his blog, and has also been used by news business pundit Jeff Jarvis.