In another thread in a different forum someone posted: “Unpossible. If someone had thought of Zapp Brannigan surely they would have mentioned it in the thread already.” People now use “unpossible” to mean “impossible” but in a silly context.
Of course there’s “embiggen” a perfectly cromulent word. IRL I hear “cromulent” used a lot more than it should be. Embiggen, not so much.
Both these examples are from The Simpsons and originally the title of this thread was Words The Simpsons have added to our vocabulary but I thought it would be more illuminating to include all TV shows.
Shazam. I know it’s originally the name of the wizard who gave Billy Batson the power to turn into Captain Marvel. but I’ll bet more people are familiar with it from hearing Gomer Pyle say it.
Unpossible was a joke word when I was a kid, decades before the Simpsons.
“Holy something” as a phrase came from Batman and still gets used a lot. Though nobody ever uses my favorite, “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!”
TV didn’t gibe us the word, but certainly popularized it.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column wondering how it was that the word segue (which he knew from his experiences in music) made it into everyday discourse, and finally concluded that it was because of Johnny Carson’s frequent use of it on The Tonight Show. I haven’t come across another interpretation, and recall Carson’s use of it.
Okay, go with bippy then. There were others from that show that I’m not recalling, but that didn’t last all that long. And even bippy may have been from somewhere else.
On the Seinfeld trend here, I think the one I hear most often would be the usage of Nazi to refer to someone who has a strict set of rules and we see it generalized constantly, grammar nazi probably one of the most common versions, but I hear it in other contexts fairly often.