In a comment on yesterday’s Towel Day post, Marta said:
The miracle of the towel! The man who realized this was a man to be reckoned with indeed.
That got me thinking: how cool it would be to come up with a… a something — an in-joke, an idea, a catchphrase, a little fictional detail, an entire story — which lodges in readers’ minds, gets passed around even among people who never read the original, and becomes part of the culture’s stock of unchanging raw materials.
Like towels in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, say.
Or — to broaden the focus to the almost 100% universal (First World) level: The Wizard of Oz. Not the book, either (sorry, L. Frank Baum) — the movie.
- “I’ll get you, my pretty.”
- “…and your little dog, too!”
- “I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks…”
- “Professor Marvel never guesses; he knows!”
- “Auntie Em! Uncle Henry!”
- “Some, where—” (You almost don’t have to finish the phrase.)
- “If I only had a brain”
- “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
- “First they tore my legs off and threw them over there…”
(etc. etc. etc. — all of which I or other people have used in conversations in recent months.)
