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Why we love to quote our favourite films and TV shows

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Linguist Lauren Gawne says we quote our favourite TV shows as a kind of social shibboleth.()
Linguist Lauren Gawne says we quote our favourite TV shows as a kind of social shibboleth.()
Why is it that we love to quote at length from our favourite films and TV shows? Tiger Webb takes a look at the intersection of language and popular culture and asks the linguistic experts about bromance, bubbling and what makes movies quotable.
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Lauren Gawne’s mother used to quote TV shows to her all the time. As a child, unfamiliar with the finer points of Fawlty Towers, Gawne missed most of the references.

I just thought that Barcelona was a place where incredibly stupid people came from.

‘I just thought that Barcelona was a place where incredibly stupid people came from,’ she says.

Now a linguist who researches the way people interact with one another, Gawne has a broader knowledge of both the seminal British comedy and the reasons why her mother would quote from things she saw on the TV.

Humans, she says, are very social creatures: ‘We like to share what we like with people as a way of identifying whether they’re part of our group.’

Quoting John Cleese, then, acts as a signifier not just of our own tastes but also as a kind of social shibboleth, allowing us to position ourselves in relation to others—to see if they ‘get it’. She raises the example of The Simpsons, which has inspired a twitter account that delivers daily quotes to nearly a quarter of a million people.

The Simpsons was what Gawne deems ‘a cultural touchstone’ for the later members of Generation X and early Millennials—quoting from it became a way to indicate your status as a watcher of The Simpsons, and therefore someone who was ‘hip’ and ‘edgy’, or any other word the uttering of which practically guarantees its speaker isn’t.

That elevated cultural position, however, is fairly ephemeral. TV shows, perhaps due to their serial nature, tend to ebb and flow in their cultural cachet. Gawne’s husband can quote nearly all of The Simpsons, yet worries about the long-term usefulness of such internalised witticisms.

Why do certain artefacts of pop culture become quotable, and others don’t? Gawne has some theories about what makes a film like The Princess Bride such a cultural milestone: ‘You’ve got catchiness, you’ve got a story that was doing something different, you’ve got a great cast.’ Indeed film as a medium would seem to have a slight edge over TV due to method of delivery—rapt attention in a quiet room—and timelessness.

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Certain moments in pop culture seem to exist, unwatched, in a sort of cultural aether—have a gander at the AFI’s list of movie quotes from American cinema’s first century and note down those you recognise despite never having seen the film. ‘The fact that you can quote from films you’ve never seen is often a good indicator of their translatability, their quotability,’ Gawne notes.

Gawne, for the record, has never seen Kindergarten Cop, but she has no trouble nailing several choice Schwarzenegger quotes from that august piece of cinema. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term ‘meme’ to define a unit of cultural transmission, would be proud. It is unknown at this point how well Dawkins can imitate Arnie.

Genre is important, too—many of the more quotable titbits of pop culture have their origin in comedy. That makes a kind of sense: the simplicity of comedic structure lends itself to brevity, which in turn enhances the likelihood of it being quoted: premise, punchline, done. It can be hard for a single line from a drama to capture the essence of its entire story, and it’s harder still to make friends quoting Kafka.

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If keeping track of pop cultural references wasn’t enough of a challenge, the English language itself is changing at breakneck speed. Even lexicographers—the people who compile our dictionaries—struggle to keep up.

Susan Butler is soft-spoken, with a zest for words and a reassuring manner. As editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, she’s a lexicographer straight out of central casting—if such a thing existed and there were parts for lexicographers in cinematic blockbusters.

‘I suppose you want me to mention bubbling,’ she says on the way to our interview. I hadn’t planned on it.

Bubbling, the way that Butler means it, is a form of urophagia that’s risen to some prominence after footballer Todd Carney was snapped in the act. While it demonstrated his hitherto unknown fervour for recycling, it nevertheless spelled PR doom for the Cronulla Shark—while giving us all a new word to play with. It plays into a larger trend in lexicography, says Butler: ‘The rules about what is a real word have changed—we’re more inclined now to count the words that come from pop culture as real words.’

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In the past, Butler continues, dictionaries tried to record not what was but what was best in language. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘the aim is to record everything.’ This is something of an inversion of the previous method. Dictionaries that once acted as the defining record of language find they now have the opposite problem—how can they predict what words will have staying power?

I asked Butler if she’d ever been dead off the mark in predicting whether a word would gain traction. After a brief pause, she recalls one: bromance. ‘I looked at it and wondered whether this one had staying power.’ That was in 2006. Now, after an onslaught of bromantic comedies and even mentions in Hansard, it’s fair to say it’s here to stay.

So where does this leave bubbling? Susan Butler is philosophical. ‘I’ve written a note about it, and put it in my odds and sods drawer. Maybe at the end of the year we’ll have another look.’

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Popular Culture, Language