I found out the other day that my 36 yo husband has never seen the movie Groundhog Day and had no idea what the movie was about. We watched it a couple of days ago and something dawned on me. I asked him “so when someone says something like “yeah it’s like Groundhog Day,” what do you think that means?”
He said “I have no idea what that means.” Which is somehow hilarious to me bc it’s such a common expression for every day feeling the same or a repetitive experience. And I know I’ve said it to him in the past and probably other people have too, and like what did he think it meant?!
Anyway, it got me thinking—what are some other common expressions/references from movies that may whoosh over others’ heads if they aren’t familiar with the movie?
ETA: so it seems like there’s different categories of things going on in the comments and I’m trying to parse out what separates what I’m asking about from oft-quoted movies.
- I’m starting to think the expression almost has to contain part or all of the title of the movie.
- The expression would be meaningless (or mean something completely different) without the existence of the movie.
- the expression basically uses the movie to apply a label to a concept? This might be too specific, not sure.
Some good examples from the comments:
- Calling someone a “stepford wife” (yes, source material is a book but I would say it’s the case with most movies and I doubt people were using this phrase as commonly before the movie(s))
- adding “ception” to the end of any word when you’re talking about a thing within a thing (even though it was correctly pointed out, that’s not really what inception means in the movie 😂)
The Bucket List is good too, but a little different to me. I had no idea that the 2007 movie was the origination of the phrase! I never saw the movie but absolutely know what it means and do not associate the phrase with a movie. Because the title itself is a literal common expression and the meaning of the expression comes from the words in the title. Whereas Groundhog Day and Stepford wife don’t give much to go on as far as interpreting the meaning unless you saw the movie.