The SDMB has got to be the best place to answer this kind of question. It sure worked when I asked about “this one time, at band camp…”, and the infamous phrase “who’s your daddy” has spurred a lot of discussion.
So here’s my idea for this thread: Catchphrases like these are always circulating through the popular Zeitgeist, and one can’t always keep track of all of them. Often there is an unstated subtext that you have to be aware of the origin of the phrase to understand. If you keep hearing something that makes you wonder, post it here and get answers from the Teeming Millions. I’ll lead off:
Every so often on MPSIMS, someone is talking to X, and then suddenly breaks into: "…and how YOU doing, X?"
While I take your post as a serious question, it strikes me as more of a MPSIMS question. Many of these phrases are nothing more than quotes from movies, which may have been language from comedy routines from current comics. And, yes, I realize that is how many things get into the language. But how currently important are phrases that my kids use, that they heard on the radio in the last few months?
Thanks, StephenG. I’d guessed it was something like that, but no, I don’t know Friends 'cause I don’t watch TV. I have no idea of what characters do what shtick on what shows.
Ummmm…not to be glib or anything, but if you are interested in the origins of catchphrases but you don’t watch tv, you are at a severe disadvantage. Catchphrases are a part of popular culture, and so is tv, like it or not.
I’m not interested in TV shows, OK? Big waste of time. But I am interested in the interplay of dialogue among intelligent minds that takes place here at the SDMB. Some people circulate catchphrases they’ve heard without even necessarily having heard them from the source. If I’m to grasp the unstated implications of a catchphrase, sometimes I gotta ask. Nobody can be expected to see all the TV shows, movies, etc., if they have a life. Are you implying that unless I watch TV, I shouldn’t participate in the SDMB?
Weird Al is right, and I don’t think he was implying anything. You live in America and want to be up on catchphrases, you gotta watch TV and go to trashy comedy films or ask somebody who does. That’s where the subtext comes from.
I could explain what the phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that” means, but a much better understanding can be gained by just watching the episode of Seinfeld that made it a popular catchphrase. The subtext of the phrase is the plot of the episode.
Quoting the Simpsons is more interesting to me, because instead of working lines from the show into the context of a conversation like a normal catchphrase, people just tend to quote whole bits of dialog from the show like they’re telling a knock-knock joke. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Whoa there! Hold on a second…I didn’t say or imply any such thing. All I said was, if you don’t watch tv you are going to be at a disadvantage at attaining your stated goal of learning the origin of various catchphrases. That’s it.
Years and years ago, there was a rather famous TV commercial that had an actor saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Sort of a weird variety of the commercial using a doctor to promote the latest pharmaceutical product.
I’ve never actually seen the commercial (or if I had, I was so young when it aired that I don’t remember it), so I don’t know what specific product it was advertising. Probably some type of over-the-counter medication.
Time has gone by since this thread started, and new catchphrases are circulating around here. New to me, at least. Here goes. Can anybody identify where these came from?[ul]
[li]“Won’t somebody please think of the children?”[/li][li]“X? What is this X of which you speak?”[/li][li]“I loves me some X”[/li][/ul]
The Simpsons??? I no longer have the cite in front of me, but I can’t believe that after all the hoopla following his death, everyone has forgotten that MR. ROGERS said this, in all seriousness, in an interview, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first.
“The Simpsons” is less often a source for catch phrases than a reservoir.
“No harm, no foul” is an old schoolyard basketball phrase
“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” – I remember this from some Nixon-era movie or television, but I can’t recall exactly what. Colonel Flagg from MASH, maybe?
