Some years ago, when I was a student, there was a discussion in class of a criminal case where a person was forced to make an impossible decision, leading to a felonious act. I commented that it was a real Sophie’s choice. Another student was unfamiliar with the reference and asked what I meant. It was the instructor who answered him, explaining the meaning and the origin of the phrase. The other student scoffed derisively and said, “Oh, it’s from a MOVIE? So not REAL language.” The term Sophie’s Choice is originally from the book of that title by William Styron, and became popular via the movie starring Meryl Streep, but the relevant point is that some people do not accept “new” language that comes from current, popular culture as “real” language. That, in my opinion, is extremely misguided.
To begin with, words enter languages in all sorts of interesting and varied ways. No language is born as a fully functioning, complete, finite entity. Most languages grow rapidly by adding new words all the time.
Let’s take the English language for starters. Most of the time, we think of the world borrowing from English, but we rarely examine how English developed over the last four or five centuries. English has borrowed hundreds of words and phrases from other languages. Many of our words for food, for example, come from French; the Anglo Saxons were still eating cow until the French gave us boeuf, which became beef, thus separating words for the animal on the hoof from the animal on the plate. English borrows a lot. English also loves to abbreviate, which gives rise to new words. Nowadays, we rarely hear, for example, telephone, opting more for the clipped phone. We don’t work out at the gymnasium, but prefer the gym. English loves to blend two words into one new word as in smog (smoke+fog), chortle (chuckle+snort), and the favorite meal of urban dwellers everywhere, brunch (breakfast+lunch). We acquire words from product names (kleenex) and place names (denim was once merely the trendy, woven material that came from a city in France or de Nimes). English speakers love acronyms, words that are formed by the multiple initials of many words. Some are obvious such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), some less so such as scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus).
Those are just a few of the myriad ways we add words and phrases to our language. How, then, could there possibly be a universe in which we do not steal language from our cultural creations? As a species, humans create. Humans use language (among other things) to create lasting records of our culture; the results are often classic works of literature from which we adopt common cultural references (Neither a borrower nor a lender be, To thine own self be true). There was a time when Shakespeare was “popular culture,” a sometimes pejorative term for “current culture.” Every age gives us memories of culture in our language. The modern age has given us film and television, both seemingly bottomless wells of language.
Sometimes, language in the form of a word or a phrase originates in a film or a television show; sometimes the entertainment form merely brings a bit of language into popular use. Sophie’s Choice is the former type; the term is now defined in dictionaries, which, to some people, makes it “real language.” Prominent in this category is the word, gaslight with its many forms. Many don’t realize that, while this form of psychological abuse where the villain slowly and subtly convinces the victim that he or she is suffering from a mental or emotional illness has been around as long as there have been people, the word itself comes from the famous 1944 film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, itself based on a play by Patrick Hamilton.
A much more recent example of language being born of film is the term, bucket list. It has quickly become so much a part of the language that we often hear people casually referring to where they want to travel or experiences they dream of having as items on their “bucket list.” Few people realize that this term was first used in the 2007 film The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two people trying to achieve their lifetime dreams before they die (or “kick the BUCKET”). One wonders how we described a person’s cosmic shift from being a good person to being the epitome of evil before the broad use of the dark side after the first instalment of Star Wars in 1977. Did you know that, until Bill Murray said it in the original 1984 Ghostbusters, we didn’t have the term toast as in If you touch my spray cheese, you’re toast?
The Godfather franchise expanded on the very term godfather to describe a mafia boss and not just a child’s presumptive guardian, not to mention giving us the quietly threatening phrase involving an offer one cannot refuse. Clueless popularized the previously-niche urban phrase, my bad (I personally love this one and use it all the time) and brought much of Valley Girl vernacular into the mainstream (as if, whatever). Many have become speechless by the sight of a beautiful face, but we weren’t twitterpated until its use in Bambi. The word bombshell, to describe a beautiful and sexy woman and not the outer casing of an explosive device, came into the language with the 1933 Jean Harlow film of that name. Not from a specific film, but from the swaggering, take-no-prisoner, claim-more-than-your-share attitude of a megastar comes the verb to bogart as in Stop bogarting the spray cheese. One of Bogart’s characters gave us Here’s looking at you, kid. And who hasn’t uttered some version of the phrase, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn even without knowing it’s from Gone with the Wind.
If film has given us so much language, we can only imagine what we’ve received and internalized from television. Film has been an important aspect of culture since the beginning of the twentieth century, but television, even more recent, lives with us in our homes. TV characters visit us in our living rooms day after day. Popular shows remain in syndicated reruns for years, even decades, after the show has taken its final bows.
We could discuss for days the contributions from TV. Today, people still quote old commercials and classic shows. If you’re of a certain age, you will recognize phrases such as You gotta lotta splainin’ to do! Or I can’t believe I ate the whole thing! Or Be careful out there! Some of the many more modern strong linguistic influencers include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friends, and, of course, the king of all quotable television shows, Seinfeld.
Buffy actually gave rise to a 2004 book, titled Slayer Slang, by Michael Adams. The book is a fun and thorough examination of the influence popular culture has on a society’s language. When one person takes half of the food meant for a large group, we might ask, sarcastically, if that person is hungry much? Or piggy much? That use of much as an adjective intensifier meant to shame comes to us directly from our favorite teen slayer of the undead. Please don’t be too wigged out by this information (also compliments of Buffy and her crew).
Friends didn’t give birth to language so much as it popularized certain phrases. When your relationship has settled into a comfortable inertia without crossing the line into romance, you might have been relegated to the friend zone. If you do something you’re definitely not supposed to do, your excuse might be that you were on a break. Your soul mate just might be your lobster.
No one can really explain how it is that Seinfeld, the show about nothing,grabbed our attention so much. Like Friends, it has found a place in the hearts of a new generation, and Seinfeld language continues to find its way into our everyday speech. People still, more than 20 years after the show ended, know what is meant by a close talker or a low talker. Everyone understands the poor etiquette of regifting and the poor hygiene of double dipping. There’s no need for further explanation when a story is cut short by yada, yada, yada. Those who don’t celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah might just be having their own celebration of Festivus. Is there any doubt as to what we are the master OF when we are master of our domain? My friend, Roz, reminds me of one of Seinfeld’s phrases that has achieved renewed relevance in these Covid times of feared toilet paper shortages: I don’t have a square to spare. Not a square.
Oh, I could go on and on, lover of both language and popular culture that I am. I hope I’ve shown that to think of the language we’ve adopted from film and TV as trivial or, in some way, not “real” is short sighted. But why take my word for it when a much better source, a true expert, exists? I’ll leave you with what Martin Scorsese has to say about the power of film because power, of course, leads to influence: “Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as ‘fantasy’ and make a hard distinction between film and life, I like to think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life. It’s in an ongoing dialog with life.”
DOING LANGUAGE 