CATCH PHRASE “You must have meant something more intelligent.”
ORIGINAL CONTEXT Whatever was said to him to prompt this pearl is long forgotten, but it was the lethal condescension of Christopher Hitchens’s response to an audience member in Madison, Wisconsin, as he swashbuckled through town in support of his book God Is Not Great, that qualifies it for our list. This was the year the atheists strode down Main Street — Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris — and the to-believe-or-not-to-believe debate, conducted for centuries in backrooms, suddenly blazed up into high noon. The mood was intemperate and the polemics were extreme. In the crossfire, there was no room for moderation. God was derided by iron-souled materialists, defended by scoundrel fundamentalists, and silently petitioned by the good folk ducking behind their shattered windows: Sweet Jesus, make it stop!
USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE AS a kiss-off, a put-down, especially girl-to-boy.
EXAMPLE “Hi Pam! Wanna go to the movies with me tonight?”
“You must have meant something more intelligent.”
CATCH PHRASE “2 girls 1 cup.”
ORIGINAL CONTEXT Well, if you don’t already know about this, I’m certainly not going to explain it to you. Flex that naughty Google-finger, but beware — as I’ve written before, there are things on the Internet that, once seen, will cause dogs to bark at you in the street for the next two weeks. Maximum disgustingness, maximum penetration. And now there is even a secondary wave of “reaction” videos (people gagging, fainting, screaming in horror, etc., as they experience the original clip). Further, a colleague on the West Coast reports seeing a pair of homeless men holding a handmade sign: “2 bums 1 cup.” In viral-marketing terms, that’s a bull’s-eye: once you reach the indigent layer, you’re made.
USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE AS an indicator of unseemly and degrading intimacy.
EXAMPLE “I saw Scott sharing his chicken salad with Ariel. Gross, right?”
“Word. That’s totally 2 girls 1 cup.”
CATCH PHRASE “Don’t Tase me, bro!”
ORIGINAL CONTEXT “By the time 2008 rolls around,” wrote our own Adam Reilly in September, “ ‘Don’t Tase me, bro!’ will have made ‘Where’s the beef?’ look downright timeless.” How wrong can an eagle-eyed and otherwise-faultless media correspondent be? Campus robo-cops may have given University of Florida student Andrew Meyer no quarter when he disrupted a speech by John “Mussolini” Kerry, but a grateful nation took him to its heart. Meyer’s blubbered and futile cry for mercy reaches out Job-like from the core of the human condition: who among us, threatened with the imminent application of reality’s mega-voltage zap gun, has not thought or uttered something similar?
USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE AS a retort to any perceived attempt to intimidate or apply pressure of an authoritarian nature.
EXAMPLE “Hey, this is a disabled parking space! You’re not disabled!”
“Don’t Tase me, bro.”
