Word (Phrase?) of the Year (so far)?; Rambo'd

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 31, 2013, at 1:39 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:

> Below is an example of a movie character being transformed into a
> verb. Of course, Rambo was a sequel title and a character.
>
> Date: Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 6:20 PM
> Subject: She 'Keyser Soze'd' me - spoiler warning
>
> Here is a somewhat specialized but entertaining vocabulary item seen in a tweet.
> Spoiler warning for the film "The Usual Suspects":

There's a virtuous circle here as well, since while in this case the character name isn't the name of the movie, the latter is a name that, AFAIK, is taken from a line from another movie, i.e. Casablanca.  (As in "Round up…")  It's unusual that as minor a character as Louie (Captain Renault) in that movie ends up with two lines as immortal as that one and "I'm shocked, shocked…"

LH

>
> [Begin tweet]
> Peter Sohn @PEETSOWN
> My 2 1/2 yr old daughter just told me a riveting story and now I
> realized she used the pictures in the room. She "Keyser Soze'd" me.
>    29 Retweets
>    16 Favorites
> 4:44 PM - 3 Nov 12
> [End tweet]
>
> The Wikipedia entry for "The Usual Suspects uses the spelling Keyser
> Soze with an umlaut over the o. Jonathan Lighter sent a message to the
> list on June 2, 2011 about the "Keyser Soeze syndrome" that is
> somewhat similar.  Dan Goncharoff sent a message about the "Keyser
> Soeze syndrome" which concerns twist endings for films
>
> Garson
>
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Ben Zimmer
> <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Word (Phrase?) of the Year (so far)?; Rambo'd
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>>>
>> [...]
>>> Also, UD has the following:
>>>
>>> Rambo'd 2 up, 9 down
>>> When you have a large machine gun in a First Person Shooter video game, and
>>> you hear an enemies footsteps, so you run around the corner and shoot left
>>> to right in a chainsaw fashion and yell/type RAMBO'D!!!!
>>>
>>> Some slang dictionaries also have "to go rambo on"
>>
>> Thread synchronicity! We can add this to the list of movie-titles-turned-verbs:
>>
>> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/when-life-imitates-the-movies-from-gaslighting-to-catfishing
>>
>> --bgz
>>
>> --
>> Ben Zimmer
>> http://benzimmer.com/
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org