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.