I thought it was incredibly stupid to use the word “unibtainium” in Avatar, as they weren’t using it in the sense described above, but that was what the substance was actually called in-universe. None too subtle.
“Shirley” became a girl’s name when Charlotte Bronte named a girl character that-- the interesting part is that it was a boy’s name, and the character was given the name (in the universe of the book), because her father wanted a boy, and didn’t even have a girl’s name prepared for his impending offspring.
As a result of the unusual name, and her father sort of thinking of her as a surrogate son, she is very headstrong, but also very clever in business, and good with money.
So the book started a trend. Once Shirley Temple got the name, there was no going back.
A similar naming trend was started by the book Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language, commonly known as Ossian, after the main character. The book purported to be the poetic works of the “northern Homer” Ossian (Oisin)., translated by Scottish poet James MacPherson and published in 1760-1765. The works achieved enormous popularity, showing that Northern Europe had a poet the equal of the ancient Greeks. The works were admired by Napoleon, Diderot, Goethe, and others. It inspired musical works by Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, and others, and was referenced by Voltaire and Wordsworth (among others).
The poem was especially popular in Scandinavia, where a mania developed for names from the poems, including Oscar, Malvina, and Selma. Immigrants brought these names to America, where their popularity spread. (My own grandmother was named “Malvina”).
The kicker is that the poems were a magnificent fraud. Although there is a thread of genuine tradition behind the characters, MacPherson’s poems were made up by him. A lot of the names (including Malvina) were made up by him, too.
I thought it was brilliant myself to call such an exotic substance a name that had already been in use in technology. It was an exellent in-joke, especially since people who weren’t familiar with it complained that it was made up for the movie. It’s exactly the kind of joke name that scientists create all the time - the Big Bang, quarks, flavors, charm, strange,
Damn, I may add this to my mischievous “What to say when someone asks what I do” list. I sometimes say “Salvage Consultant” but haven’t run into any Travis McGee fans who’d recognize it.
Huh? It seemed pretty popular in the late 1970s when the original series was running
.[quote=“Colibri, post:48, topic:926081”] A-Team ; “I pity the fool…”
[/quote]
There was no L pronounced in that partial phrase when Mr. T would say it.
It was more like “I pitty the foo…”
What’s “Humina-humina-humina” from?
Get Smart, “Missed it by that much!”
I don’t quite know if this is what you’re asking for but, in reference to the host of Let’s Make a Deal some unusually easy/lucrative D&D sessions (or campaigns) were referred to as Monty Hall (or “Monty Haul”) campaigns.
And maybe this is out-of-bounds, but please give me an excuse to exact a horrific revenge upon you was regurgitated every other minute and recycled in a lot of other works after Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact came out: “Go ahead…make my day!”
[But then again, each of the Dirty Harry movies spawned at least a few months of “Do ya, Punk?” or “Marvelous!” imitations but they’re no longer ‘part of the language’ used every day…]
Not quite as pithy, but The Venture Brothers also used “costumed aggression” as a name for the practice of supervillainy as a whole.
There was even a sales pitch: “Say there, were you the bully at your school? Are you currently an embittered loner with no friends? Do you often think, ‘That guy’s a dork. I’d like to kick his ass.?’ Then a career in costumed aggression might be for you!”
Serendipitous typo, but I agree with you. Even if you never heard the word before, it doesn’t take a genius to realize “Unobtainium” = “Something impossible or difficult to obtain.”
So when the stuff they’re trying to obtain is actually called unobtanium… maybe the term “lazy writing” comes to mind?
If it was used in TBBT or Firefly, where you had actual writers who gave a shit, then it might have been a clever homage. But…
That’d be my guess, given the context (I mean, it’s Avatar, one of the only movies I enjoyed but had completely forgotten by the time I got to the car).
Interesting. I was “unavailable for viewership” for the original series over the air, but I do remember some media in “the aughts” commenting on the use of “frak” in the new reboot.
Tripler
I had to switch to “dag-gum” for my professional, work environment."
The OP asked for words “that ended up entering the language as everyday words.” As far as I know, this doesn’t apply to any Klingon words, but I could be wrong.
