- Movies like "Star Wars," "Ghostbusters," and "Clueless" are celebrated as classics.
- They also have made some surprising contributions to our vocabularies.
- Common words popularized by movies include "catfish," "my bad," and even "toast."
Movies have long influenced the way people talk, and sometimes, it's in ways we don't even realize.
Movies from "Star Wars" to "Clueless" have contributed words and phrases to our vocabularies that we use every day. Linguists are always keeping tabs on the subtle ways cinema has crept into our lexicons.
Take the word "toast" as a synonym for "dead," like when someone says, "I'm toast." Surprisingly, the first known use of "toast" in that way came from Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters" — and he came up with the line on the spot.
Read on to learn about some popular and words and phrases for which we can thank the movies.
Toast
When Bill Murray uttered "All right, this chick is toast!" in 1984's "Ghostbusters," few knew he was making linguistic history.
But believe it or not, Murray's line — delivered right before the film's climactic showdown — is the first known instance of the word "toast" being used to mean dead, finished, or doomed.
That's according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which directly cited the film as the source of the slang term. Green's Dictionary of Slang also pegs the origins of "toast" to the 1980s.
Funnily enough, Murray's famous line wasn't even in the "Ghostbusters" script, which originally called for him to say, "I’m gonna turn this guy into toast." Murray was said to have ad-libbed the line that eventually appeared in the film, and the change was significant:
"In our opinion, Murray’s alteration made all the difference. There's a huge semantic gulf between 'I'm gonna turn you into toast' and 'You're toast,'" wrote the editors of the blog Grammarphobia.
Murray's coinage spread like wildfire, and is so widespread today that it's hard to believe it's less than 35 years old.
My bad
"Clueless" introduced millions of viewers to Valley Girl slang, including gems like "As if!" and "Whatever."
While both of those slang expressions enjoyed decades of documented use before "Clueless" came out in 1995, there's another popular phrase whose popularity is even more closely tied to the film: "My bad."
Despite its widespread popularity today, "my bad" was largely still a niche expression pre-"Clueless." The earliest print citations for "My bad" are from as recently as 1985, according to linguist Ben Zimmer, and it was used primarily in the world of playground basketball. By the end of the decade, the phrase was still uncommon enough that sportswriters felt the need to explain its meaning in newspaper columns.
"After making a bad pass, instead of saying 'my fault,' Manute Bol says, 'my bad.' Now all the other Warriors say it too," USA Today wrote in 1989.
While "Clueless" didn't invent "my bad," it was instrumental in bringing it into the mainstream, and provided many viewers with their first exposure to the phrase.
Bucket list
In 2007's "The Bucket List," two terminally ill strangers go to great lengths to fulfill each others' greatest wishes before they die, or "kick the bucket."
Many people incorrectly believe the phrase "bucket list" was in use before the film came out, but in reality, it was the film's screenwriter Justin Zackham who invented the term back in 1999, when he wrote up his own bucket list, according to linguist Ben Zimmer.
"The film’s release brought the phrase into common parlance, and, as a testament to how natural and idiomatic it sounds, many people assume the term must have long predated the movie," Zimmer wrote.
Once the phrase entered the English language, its meaning expanded to include a list of things to do before any deadline, such as the last day of school or the end of summer.
See the rest of the story at INSIDER
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