- TV shows like Friends, SNL, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld have made a lasting cultural impact.
- They even added words to the dictionary.
- Once these TV shows aired, words like "spam,""regifting," and "going commando" became part of common parlance.
Television plays an important role in society — it educates, connects with us emotionally, offers cultural commentary, and makes us laugh.
But TV plays an important linguistic role as well. Language experts play close attention to the way TV shows influence the way we talk, and some of the most interesting linguistic developments are associated with TV.
Take the word "spam," for instance. Once just a canned lunch meat, spam now refers to junk email, and it's all because of a 1970 "Monty Python" sketch. And there are plenty of other examples, too, from shows like Friends, SNL, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld.
Read on to learn about some of the most enduring words that got their starts on popular TV shows.
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Not!
It's hard to believe that one of the most basic joke constructions got its start on Saturday Night Live, but that's exactly the case with "not!"
The joke made its formal debut in a famous 1990 "Wayne's World" sketch featuring cast members Mike Myers and Dana Carvey and host Tom Hanks. At one point, Myers turned to Hanks and said, "Anyways, Barry, that was really interesting," before looking into the camera and adding, "not!"
The joke turned into one of the sketch's many catchphrases, and had such staying power that "Not!" was named the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year in 1992.
Before that sketch, the word had floated around in the vernacular of UCLA college students in the late 1980s, according to the Orlando Sentinel, and before that, Steve Martin had ad-libbed a similar line in a 1978 SNL sketch.
But we can thank "Wayne's World" for bringing the "not" joke into the mainstream, and for inspiring one of the more memorable scenes in "Borat" history.
Spam
Canned Spam has been around since the 1930s, but we can thank a 1970 Monty Python sketch for its alternate internet-related definition.
The sketch is set in a cafe where nearly every menu item contains Spam. The references to the canned lunch meat increase until eventually, all the dialogue is drowned out by a chorus of Vikings singing "Spam!" repeatedly.
As internet chatting became possible in the 1980s and 1990s, some early netizens flooded online message boards with lyrics to the song, drowning out other conversation much like the Vikings from the Monty Python sketch. The practice became known as "spamming" the message boards, and by 1990, the definition of spam had expanded to any unsolicited online messages sent to a large number of people.
Regifting
The practice of giving someone a gift you had previously received yourself has been around as long as gifts have been given.
But calling that practice "regifting" only became popular thanks to a 1995 episode of "Seinfeld," in which a regifted label maker becomes a topic of concern among the show's characters. Merriam-Webster cites the episode as the first known use of the term.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider