Remember the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Richard Lewis is convinced he started the phrase “The blank from hell”?
Obviously, that’s ridiculous, but who here can claim they started a phrase which got popular, at least in a local context?
I don’t know, but it amuses me no end when Poster A uses the phrase “metric shitload” or “metric buttload”, and Poster B comes along and says, “Hey! You owe me a new keyboard! That’s brilliant!! Mind if I steal that??”
It seems to happen at least once a month.
AFAIK, I was the first person to describe someone of low intelligence as “wading in the shallow end of the gene pool.”
Nah. Not on purpose, anyway. “Penis ensues” belongs to the masses - they ran with it. I hid under a rock.
As a result of several years of working in advertising and brand consulting…
Aibo (which Sony just killed, the rat bastards)
Mindstorm (the Lego robot kits)
A whole bunch of others, but they’re not as well known.
When I was a child I would have sworn on a stack of Holy bibles that I invented the word “nincompoop”
I believed it so much so that I argued with my mother at lengths end, that I did indeed, invent this word. :rolleyes:
I have no idea why I thought that.
When I lived in Hawai`i, my roommate and I would occasioanlly consume certain recreationals and get a friend to drive us around the island while we, um, watched things happen. I had moved around a lot, so every few miles on one particular trip, I would occasioanlly point wildly out the window and say "I don’t mean to sound deja vu-ish, but I used to live right over there! "
Hence, "I don’t mean to sound deja vu-ish but (insert sometihng here) entered our social lexicon for a while. That was 12, 13, 14, years ago, and when I saw the now-ex roommate recently I used it again and he couldn’t stop laughing. Ahh, good times, good times.
I invented the phrase: “I invented the phrase.”
I am thinking of making it a trademark.
I invented the word ‘gullible’.
wow, i’ve had a bunch of things get popular after i’ve said em…
um, one i can think of right now is from the first austin powers movie. a buddy of mine had two younger brothers, and we’d pick on brother do jour and kep asking him if he was going to cry…and squirt some tears…this was…a couple years before austin powers came out, so i’m not sure if we got it before the script was even written, or if we both had divine intervention.
“barking spiders” as a euphemism for farting. i did that one, too. i never even thought it was very funny, but apparently some people did. i’m sure this one predates me, but the first time i ever heard it, i said it, and then people around me started saying it.
if i think of mine, i’ll post em, but it’s been many moons ago since i’ve thought of em.
Ahhh, perfect. I’d long been meaning to start a thread to see if my claim could be disproved. This will do nicely.
This would be roughly 1985, give or take a year. A group of us from school spent our free time hanging around on Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk, generally acting like a buncha no-good long-haired troublemakers.
There was a homeless man who we saw there every day – Abe Jones, the moaner of Pt. Pleasant boardwalk – he would spend all day walking the boardwalk, moaning quietly to himself. After awhile, he became our group’s personal charity case. When we were buying pizza or anything, an extra slice was generally picked up for 'ol Abe.
Now, I’m sure many groups of teens have large made-up vocabularies. I don’t think the fact that we could carry on long conversations with most of the words meaning nothing to an outside observer is anything new. Well, one day, my friend Jerry and I turned the old guy into a slang term. We decided that in honor of Abe, if you were really hurting for something, then you would be deemed as “jonesing” for it.
I remember being a little put off when people in our school who weren’t in our click started using the term (“Hey! That’s our word! Back off!”). That became amazement the following year when we started hearing kids from surrounding schools using it. It was a few years after that that it went to full-blown shock when I started hearing it in general use on television and such.
Did we invent a now-common slang word? Well, I know that at least locally it originated with us. Whether or not it came out somewhere as well, I can’t say. Can you? Anyone know of someone jonesing for anything before 1985?
forgive the typos. it’s morning. i don’t morning very well.
My wife, Pepper Mill, believes that she invented the term “ship’s cleavage”, refering to Marina Sirtis, Deanna Troi on Star Trek: TNG. Seeing a picture of her in the only Trek shirt that seemed to feature decolletage, she retorted “What’s she? Ship’s Cleavage?” She says that she heard the term constantly after that at conventions and elsewhere.
I don’t know if it’s true or not. It could be a case of Great Minds Thinking Alike (I know that several phrases I’ve coined on my own – Brooke Shields is The Creature from the Blue Lagoon – have turned up on the lips and in the writings of others), but Pepper’s convinced that this is her creation that has spread throughout fandom.
Daniel
The Mavens (Actually, this was pre-Maven, but I can’t remember who wrote the early ones…he was Random House’s dictionary editor at the time), put it in the 60s, meaning, specifically, a need for heroin until the 70s. (Wish I could dig up a better cite, but that’s the best I have access to.)
Now, I don’t THINK I did, but sometimes I could swear I coined the term ‘snark’, to mean…well…snark. I got funny looks the first time I said it, and I still get people who act like I did…
William Safire has a citation from 1970. Link.
There was a well spread joke when I was a kid:
“How do you sink a norwegian submarine?”
“You knock on the submarine’s door and the captain willl open up and say hello.”
When I was around eleven, I told my two friends a follow-up joke to this:
“How do you sink a russian submarine?”
“You knock on the submarine’s door and the captain will open up and say: ‘We’re not as foolish as the norwegians!’”
A few months later, I saw this joke, word by word as I had phrased it to my friends, in a magazine. I still have no idea how it got that far.
Lewis Carroll wtrote “The Hunting of the Snark” over a century ago. Some people tyhink the term was inspired by a misprint for “shark”. In any event, there was a missile called the Snark back in the 1950s. The name was also one suggestede and rejected for the Nostromo’s landing craft in the movie Alien. People have been talking about “snarkiness” for a long time, but it seems unrelateed to Carroll’s mythical beast.
The first use of term in regards to “snarkiness” I read of was in the early eighties in a book by Gordon Korman - “I Want To Go Home” written in 81 (I guess I read it in 87?).
I didn’t start it on teh interweb, but I infected my friends with the use of the term “pancake” - as in “What the Pancake” and “you pancaking motherpancaker”. Helps that I control the dirty word filter at one place, too, so now it’s an official subsitution.
Must track down that book…prove to people I didn’t make the word up. >_>