I’m pretty sure “Beautiful, downtown _________” to mean a nonentity comes from Laugh-in. I guess there is a downtown area in Burbank, but it’s not much to remark on, since it’s essentially a suburb or LA, and is not very attractive.
“The $64,000 Question” to mean the root query at hand, or the heart of the matter, comes from a game show called that, when $64,000 was the ultimate prize, and had the buying power of something more like $300,000.
“Grifters” to mean “con artists,” and “graft” to mean a “con game” I think were around before the movie The Grifters, but I don’t think they were in common parlance-- I think they were pretty much limited to law enforcement and the legal profession, and maybe grifters themselves. The word certainly had no connotative meaning of simply being able to fool people in some way that is significant but perfectly legal.
I can’t personally vouch for this one, but someone old enough to know once told me that the word “bunch” to mean a group of people shifted meaning after it was used for the show The Brady Bunch. I was told that the word “bunch” used to imply that the group of people thusly described was up to no good (cf The Wild Bunch). It lost that meaning, and simply meant “a group of people” after the show had been on a while. So I guess the show’s title was meant to be ironic, or tongue-in-cheek, but the very iconic status of the show caused it to lose that aura.
Paparazzo (“a freelance photographer of celebrities”) wasn’t a word before Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In the film, a character (played by Walter Santesso) whose last name was Paparazzo was such a photographer.
The English slang term mondo (“very large”, “very much”) probably comes from the title of the Italian film Mondo Cane (1962).
Twitterpated (“love-struck”) is from Bambi (1942).
Kitty Foyle (a style of dress) is named for the 1940 film starring Ginger Rogers.
Bombshell in the sense “beautiful woman” is from from the 1933 film Bombshell starring Jean Harlow, later re-released under the title Blonde Bombshell.
Big bad as a noun phrase (meaning “main adversary”) is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of course, its use as an adjectival phrase is much older, as in “big bad wolf.”
The catchphrase “Resistance is futile” has been mentioned already. But recently, I have been seeing Borg collective being used outside a Star Trek context to mean a political group whose members are expected to follow the leadership uncritically.
Interestingly, it’s a word, like zucchini, that is rarely used in singular form in English. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone referred to as “a paparazzo,” but rather as “a member of the paparazzi.”
Weirdly, if I recall correctly “Big Bad” (with no noun attached) originated in discussions of “Buffy,” by fans and show-writers who had noticed a pattern in how season long arcs worked, and was only later used on the show (much as the show adopted the term “Scooby gang” for Buffy’s associates after fans began using it).
wow I only know that phrase from Winnie the pooh because Tigger used it … i have to see if it was used in the books or if Disney just added it to the character …
That’s a great example! And I never saw that show in the original, just in afternoon reruns in the late 1970s, but I get it. I know some very young people who have never seen the show, but understand what it means.
I just thought of something else: when a person recounts something that happened to them, that was weird, or uncanny, or spooky in some way, instead of responding with a word, someone in the conversation may say “Do-do-do-do” to the tune of “The Twilight Zone” theme. I have even heard this used as a genuine adjective. IE: “It was so ‘do-do-do-do,’” or “The most ‘do-do-do-do’ thing I’ve ever witnessed was [thing].”
It’s not a word by any stretch, but it’s still part of the lexicon. I guess you could call it a “lexical item,” like making the sound of a whip cracking, or saying “Hm-mmm,” to dissent. Or “D’oh!”
