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Notes on CatchWhich catchphrases should be "thrown under the bus"?

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:49 PM ET

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Matt Feeney examined SportsCenter catchphrases. Bryan Curtis celebrated the advertising value of Seinfeld catchphrases. Alex Ross reviewed The Big Lebowski in the context of the immortality of indie film. Jonah Weiner grouped together rappers and musicians who repeat themselves so often that they create their own catchphrases. Timothy Noah credited Jack Abramoff for the birth of a Washington catchphrase. Eric Lichtenfield deemed Die Hard's "Yippee Ki Yay Mo—" the greatest catchphrase in movie history. And here are the results of Slate's action-movie one-liner contest.

Please don't try to defend it, public-radio people. Please just take it away.

Then there's the case of "teh." I'm sure Susan Sontag would have a "note" on "teh." I'm sure there will be academic studies on it if there aren't already. (Just as there has been a proliferation of academic studies of "dude," a subject I first wrote about in 2003.)

"Teh" is unique because it's such a purely blogospheric phenomenon. "Teh"—the deliberate misspelling of "the"—already has … wait for it (as they say) … its own Wikipedia entry. Its meaning, though, is still fluid and fungible. But there's something appealing about it as a specifier with more character than plain old "the." It has a kind of self-deprecating delicacy to it. "Teh" calls attention to a word in a subtly more tentative way than just "a" or "the" does. It's the third specifier. It's a little fey, a little twee, a little "teh" goes a long "weh," you might "seh." But I wouldn't vote it off the island, so to speak.

I don't mean this to be an exhaustive study, just notes. But I hope that it will start a conversation about how to decide when a phrase should be thrown under the bus.

Here are some I'm on the bubble about, as they say, because they have some virtues that make up for the feeling they've been overused. Or maybe there's a good reason they get overused. I'd be interested to see which ones Slate readers would want to preserve or make disappear. Gawker has "commenter executions." I'd like to see occasional Slate "Phrase Purges," "Bus Tosses," or something like that, so we can identify at what points a phrase goes from buzz to buzzkill (as "buzzkill" is due to) and from buzzkill to roadkill (which still rocks). (By the way, what about the formulation "X rocks a retro '90s look"? Roadkill?)

So, thumbs up or thumbs down:

stay classy
up in your grill
overshare
tell us something we don't know
man up
go-to
drinking the Kool-Aid
mad props

I still like "mad props." I'm a sucker for anything with "mad" in it, basically. It's a great praise word. And "stay classy" still feels new and still performs a useful function. I'm on the bubble on "drank the Kool-Aid," which has been used unfairly on Obama supporters by those who bought the Clinton talking points, but you've got to respect that it's been around for a quarter-century now and still has "punch," so to speak. Mass cult suicide will do that for ya. But, seriously, "Kool-Aid" must speak to an enduring concern: lemminglike destructive cult behavior, an unfortunately recurrent, if not always deadly, cultural phenomenon. As for the others: under the bus.

Finally, "Dude." Sorry, guys, but the whole Lebowski cult just killed it with its heavy-handed attempt at lightheartedness by geek dudes who—how shall I put this delicately?—don't do lighthearted well. Sorry dude geeks: I now pronounce "Dude" over.