I thought there was a very recent thread on this subject, so if a mod can find it and put this post into it and close this one - much appreciated.
Words that are unique enough that we can obviously bypass “hey”, “yeah”, etc.
I don’t care what company I’m in, if I hear the phrase, “just the two of us”, with Telefon-like consistency I’ll break into the Grover Washington Jr. go-to that, really - do I need to link?
The hedge fund Millennium is now indelibly associated in my mind with the string part from the theme to “You Only Live Twice” (via Robbie Williams’s song “Millennium”).
Related to this, our oven plays the first three notes of “Dixie” when the timer sounds, and I often hum the rest.
From about 1995 to 2005, whenever I shut down my laptop it would play what I always heard as four notes from Gary Numan’s “Cars” (though actually one of the notes is a slightly different pitch, giving the laptop song a happier feel than the Cars song).
This is a real issue for me. My brain is so full of music and lyrics that I’m not sure I have room for anything else. And I CAN’T get an association out of there. For instance, I started using (and later teaching) the web design software Dreamweaver. Some days the name would get repeated a dozen times. Cue vapid 70’s synth hit every single damn time… [No, I’m not linking to that! I might accidentally hear a snippet!]
Oh, and I have a friend Roxanne…
I’ll miss things she says; all I’m hearing is The Police on a good day, Eddie Murphy all too often. It’s taken massive self-control to never sing this in her presence.
The oven noise story above brought back this memory:
In the early 90s, the lid of our changing table made a springy metallic sound that reverberated… exactly like the dub-like sound at the beginning of a Fellow Travellers song. So my kid got that sung to him at least once a day (now he’s into post-punk, so I don’t think listening to a folk/reggae/dub band had any effect…).
If I open the door to my '08 Mazda 3 with keys in the ignition, it goes beepbeep…beepbeep…beepbeep and my brain starts playing the strings at the start of Philadelphia Freedom by Elton John.
If I hear a police siren, I’ll blurt out “Puh-lice! Puh-lice!”, Joe Flaherty style.
When shortened names are bandied about, I’ll contribute from an Odd Couple episode where Felix, after yet another misguided bonhomie pep-talk, addresses his roommate as “Osc!”
Oscar, seething and ready to kill Felix, grits his teeth and says, “Sure, Feeeel”.
Another Odd Couple’er, oddly - whenever someone said the timeworn gotcha “when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me”.
The beeps made by the tyre-inflating compressor at my local Sainsbury’s, when holding down the button to set the required pressure, start slowly then quickly jump to double the tempo, causing me to whip my finger away so it doesn’t climb too fast. In so doing, it exactly replicates the rhythm of the bass-drum intro to Blue Monday.
When my van had a corroded wheel and routinely lost pressure, I visited frequently. Couldn’t get New Order out of my head for months…
I’ve seriously been wondering all day: how does this come up in daily conversation? Who says “She’s got huuuuge…” as a setup? Or do you have to set your own earworm up and do both halves yourself?
The two-note tone on Star Trek TNG (and maybe others?) when somebody is ringing someone else’s cabin door (5-1 on a scale) always made me sing "… meet the Flintstones, " as it sounds like the first 2 notes of the Flintstones theme song. Used to drive my (now-ex) husband batty.
