13 Common Phrases Popularized By Movies and TV Shows

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13 Common Phrases Popularized By Movies and TV Shows

Phrases, jokes, and even words themselves have been going viral long before “going viral” was ever a phrase. For example, the term “bite the bullet” originated when anesthesia was in short supply, and old school doctors literally asked soldiers to bite down on a bullet before whatever barbaric “surgery” they’d perform. Hey, there’s another one. Barbaric: Savage, and exceedingly brutal, ya know, like a Barbarian. Anyway… We like to toss around fun little terms and phrases like this to put a little spice in our descriptions, but some of the most popular ones today actually originated in TV and movies.

That’s some good writing right there. A screenwriter, or in some cases, a good improviser, conjured up a word or two that described something so perfectly that it went “viral” in our day to day vernacular. In many cases, Websters and/or The Oxford English Dictionary gave them official definitions, and that’s just “radulicious.” Feel free to take radulicious and run with it! Till that clearly takes off, here are 13 common phrases popularized by movies and TV shows.

Want to do that before you croak? Put it on your bucket list.

CRACKED BUCKET LIST In the 2007 film The Bucket List, two terminally ill strangers cross things off their list before they kick the bucket. They were the first two to use the expression, which was created by screenwriter Justin Zackham in 1999 when he created his own bucket list.

In The Know / IMDB 

Take an improv class, kids. You might change the English language.

CRACKED YOU'RE TOAST! Bill Murray created linguistic history when he improvised the line, All right, this chick is toast! in 1984's Ghostbusters. The Oxford English Dictionary added it as an alternate usage of the word toast, meaning a person or object that is defunct, dead, finished, etc.

Grammarphobia / USA Today 

When it came to the phrase's lasting impact, Alicia Silverstone was clueless. Sorry.

CRACKED MY BAD The term first surfaced in 1985, but was explicitly used in basketball. The 1995 movie Clueless brought it to the masses, and also gave us '90s hits whatever and as if.

Phrases / Insider 

Technically, while watching Friends, we’re all in “the friend zone.”

CRACKED THE FRIEND ZONE It was first used on Friends in 1994's The One with the Blackout. Ross is trying to be more than friends with Rachel, and Joey says, You waited too long to make your move, and now you're in the friend zone.

Youtube / EW 

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