I’m 34, and what I know about Rocky is that he’s a fictional boxer played by Slyvester Stallone and that he had way too many sequels. Oh, and I know the tune to “Eye of the Tiger”, but that’s mostly from Weird Al and being in college band. I wouldn’t recognize any particular quote from him.
“Marco”
“Polo”
I doubt if my 90 yr old father (or his 88 yr old wife) would know anything about Star Wars, or generally any pop culture references. And he is as sharp as a tack.
Superman, Mickeymouse, baseball, hamburgers, etc. aren’t cultural references. They are icons or characters or whatever. They are things that you refer to, but the cultural reference is the quote, action, or whatever.
Nah. It’s Gilligan and Casey Anthony
“Every American” would have to include newly sworn-in citizens, and many movie references and ad slogans might be lost on them. I’d have to go with something like MacDonald’s.
Try it. See what happens. Report back.
Would every American recognise Mt Rushmore? If not, then I think there’s no chance the OP’s question can be answered.
I don’t get it.
By the way semiotics is the study of signs, maybe Sontag used it in some limited context to mean what you say but I’ve never come across that definition before.
You’re an exception, then, IME. “Yo, Adrian” seems to be one of those quotes indelibly attached to Sylvester Stallone.
I have another one. Arnold Scharzenegger delivering “I’ll be back” in the Terminator.
I think Santa wins easily if he counts under the OP’s definition of “Cultural Reference”.
I think digs meant to quote the Gilligan’s Island theme song. Only, they got it wrong: the lyrics are actually “a three hour tour”, not “a three hour cruise”.
I still wouldn’t have got it. I dunno if that ever aired here but it was before my time if it did. Gilligan is one of those secondhand American references that is common though, from Bloom County, The Simpsons etc. I still encounter American cultural tropes regularly where I was ignorant of the original but recall the Simpsons lampooning them.
I really hope you’re not telling your students Gilligan’s Island is well-known around the world, because it’s really not in the UK and frankly, if we don’t get an American cultural reference then it’s unlikely many other countries (except Canada) will do either.
For that matter, I can easily believe it’s quickly ceasing to be well-known even to American kids… I have no evidence for this assumption, but I imagine most of its relevance to American kids of, say, my generation comes through it being the sort of old show that was ubiquitously rerun on television in the middle of the day when you had school off, the kind of crap you’d watch because there was nothing better on. In a world of exploding availability of viewing choices, I doubt many kids are going to spend that much time on half-century old kitsch.
I vaguely know the theme song because you can sing it to the tune of Amazing Grace, but I’ve never seen an episode.
Although a certain segment of the american youth may be slightly familiar as Veggie Tales did a skit parodying Gilligan’s Island.
How about the Macarena? You might not remember how to do the dance, but I’m sure you’ll recognize it when you see it.
The word for “thing that you refer to” is “referent.” But that’s not what people have been saying. We’re not saying that baseball itself is the reference, but that the reference to baseball would be widely recognized. An image of baseball, or a mention of baseball, is a reference to the cultural fact and role of the referent baseball. Every single thing mentioned in the thread is a cultural reference at some level.
What about the Bald Eagle as a symbol for the USA? Surely even South Americans would recognize that?
I guess that’s also part of what we’re hung up on. By Americans do we mean both continents, or does the OP really just mean the USA?
“Star spangled banner”.