This brings to mind a conversation I’ve had from time to time with coworkers: Are you quoting something if you don’t mean to do so? That is, if you use a direct quote from a movie/TV series/whatever, but are just using it to mean what it says, rather than as a quote per se? Like, if I’m frustrated with my office computer (as often happens) and I exclaim “COME ON!”, am I quoting GOB in Arrested Development if my intention isn’t to quote him, but simply to express my frustration? Alternately, am I quoting him if my intent is to express my frustration, but my inflection in pronouncing “COME ON!” is influenced by the way Will Arnett said it?

– Josh, comments section.

That’s a good question, and I don’t really have an answer. I guess it’s quoting, sort of. Some sort of late-period language acquisition?

Whatever, probably just semantics. What I know for sure is that I do this all the time. Sometimes I feel like I entirely speak in vague movie and TV references — allusions, Michael! — and I use the same Arrested Development Josh mentions with some frequency, as well as a bunch of others (most notably, “her?” and the way Tony Wonder says, “it’s f***ed up”).

On this site, I often use the construction, “because hey, (something good),” which is ripped off from Jack Handy but so entrenched in my linguistic toolbox that I no longer really consider the source.

But certainly the biggest pop-culture influence on my spoken (and maybe written) language are Adam Sandler’s first two albums — They’re All Gonna Laugh at You and What the Hell Happened to Me? — which I wore out in my youth. There are countless quotes from those albums that I started using ago with the appropriate inflection, but have since become so much a part of the regular arsenal of things I say that now they just sound, even to me, like me.

Have we heard the last (truly memorable) word from Hollywood?

Probably not, but it’s been a while since the movies had everybody parroting a great line.

Like, say, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was from “Sudden Impact,” written by Joseph Stinson and others, more than 27 years ago.

Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.

– Michael Cieply, New York Times.

For what it’s worth, I don’t really buy it. I think — as a couple of the experts in the story suggest — it probably takes time for the transcendent and lasting movies quotes to separate from the mire. Saying that we simply don’t make quotable movies anymore strikes me as senseless nostalgia.

I will offer this, though: There are some reasonable explanations, if it’s the case that movies are no longer as universally quotable. For one, Hollywood studios now rely on foreign box offices for 68% of ticket sales, creating more pressure to make blockbuster movies that will succeed in translation and so perhaps less emphasis on dialogue.

Plus — and I think more importantly — the era filled with supposedly unquotable movies covered in the article has seen the rise of great TV.

Thanks to more competition among satellite and cable providers, we have more channel options. There is undeniably better and bigger-budget programming on those channels, and HDTV technology allows us to enjoy that programming in quality that rivals or betters the cinema from the comfort and convenience of our living rooms.

And when I think about it, while I really don’t quote a ton of movies from the last few years, I quote The Wire, The Office, Park and Recreation and Arrested Development almost constantly.

Hat tip to Jonah Keri for the link.