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Sweet Rose Ramblings (AKA The Call-Waiting Blog)

A place for my unformed thoughts. Help me sort them out!

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Baloney

My co-worker was pondering which came first - the phrase "That's baloney" or the meat. A quick search on wikipedia gives us the answer - the meat (and we all know that all information on the Internet is for sure true). Whatever the truth is, it did make me wonder what it takes to turn a personal catch-phrase into an accepted slang term, even becoming the first definition at dictionary.com. Does it take teaching the catch-phrase to all your friends, encouraging them to tell all their friends and so on? Could you start it on a blog? Insert it into a movie or TV show and watch its popularity go from there? Or does it take some elusive popularity boost and advertising pitch in order to gain its acceptance in the lexicon of American or even international language? One thing is for sure - you must start with a good phrase. Hmmm...

3 Comments:

At April 12, 2007 2:49 PM, Blogger SaraK said...

TV shows are definitely a place where catch phrases originate, especially Seinfeld.

 
At April 12, 2007 4:17 PM, Blogger Ezzie said...

Sometimes they start in the blogosphere, though those may just be blog terms. Heh is more popular thanks to Glenn Reynolds; kerfuffle is popular thanks to James Taranto's Best of the Web; Hot Chanies we owe thanks to Shifra for. :)

 
At April 12, 2007 6:13 PM, Blogger Scraps said...

Hehe...Ezzie beat me to the Hot Chanie mention! It's the first example that popped into my head. :)

 

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