Spring Break
The Daily OrangeCatchphrase: College vocabulary influenced by pop culture
By Brittney Davies
Posted: 2/23/09, 2:53 AM EST Section: Feature
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Those scrambling for their Merriam-Webster dictionaries shouldn't expect to find anything - it's a made-up word made popular by the cast of "Laguna Beach."
Buchwalter also uses acronyms like "BFF" and "TTYN" ("talk to you never"). "I used to make fun of (Paris Hilton's show), but it sticks," said Buchwalter, a junior broadcast journalism major at Syracuse University.
Television has always been credited with sparking trends - the "Rachel haircut" copied from "Friends," the "Sex and the City" Cosmo, and more recently, Lauren Conrad-inspired headbands - but catchphrases also become popular after they're on TV.
"People are admired for being creative, which is often how slang words come into place," said William Ritchie, an associate professor of linguistics.
"Probably the greatest of all time would be Homer Simpson's 'd'oh,'" said Robert Thompson, a television, radio and film professor and the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at SU. "I mean, that's now in the Oxford dictionary of the English language. And it's a really useful word. We don't quite have anything in the English language that expresses that kind of exasperation."
Even "meh," also of "The Simpsons" fame, was added to the Collins English Dictionary.
Today's frequently used TV-derived catchphrases include "bromance" (thank you, Brody Jenner), "That's what she said" (oh, Michael Scott) and "spotted" (as in "Spotted: At the steps of the Met, an S and B power struggle") from "Gossip Girl."
Sarah Tepper, a sophomore sport management major, said she uses TV words like "spotted" once in a while.
"I don't think I use them seriously," she said.
Going back a few years, there was "fierce" from "Project Runway" and Ashton Kutcher's "punk'd," as well as the trend of the "McDreamy-McSteamy" code names.
While most of the time these words are thought of as having been born on TV, that's usually not the case.
"Bromance," in fact, was around long before MTV popularized it. The term was heavily used to describe the relationship between Turk and J.D. on "Scrubs." But urbandictionary.com credits its debut to Dave Carnie, then-editor of Big Brother magazine, who used it to describe skateboarders who spend all their time together.
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MPH
posted 2/23/09 @ 8:57 AM EST
To Sarah Trad: We're sorry that you're too good for TV watching and that you are only influenced by your friends. As a film major, you will need to pay a lot more attention to pop culture and society to make it in a demanding and economically-unnecessary field. (Continued…)
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