August 11, 2007
The bard of Springfield
Ben Macintyre ("Any word that embiggens the vocabulary is cromulent with me", Times OnLine, 8/11/2007), considers "the role of the The Simpsons in the evolution of the English language", and quotes me:
According to Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania Linguistic Data Consortium: "The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions."
This was the inspiration for the cute illustration heading the piece:
Since I may become famous as the source of this quotation, I'm encouraged to wonder whether it's true.
This all started back in March of 2004, when I mentioned the idea in passing and in a rather non-authoritative tone:
Bert sends along an intriguing example from The Simpsons (By the way, I've been told that The Simpsons has now taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as the largest single source of quotations and allusions in English-language text. I'm not sure who measured this, or how, or when. Most likely someone just made it up, like 87% of all cited statistics. However, it might well be true...)
I recycled the idea, more boldly but still modified by "apparently", in a post titled "Homeric objects of desire", 1/7/2005:
The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catch phrases and sundry other textual allusions.
So now that it's too late, I'm asking myself, in my intermittently positivist sort of way, is it true? I'll do some thinking about how to test such a thing, but if you have any suggestions (or even better, any results), let me know.
[Note that Macintyre is also indebted to Ben Zimmer's Language Log post " Meh-ness to society", 6/8/2006; and probably also to the many contributions of the world's foremost expert on Simpson inguistics ("Simpsonolinguistics"? "Simpsolinguistics">?), Heidi Harley.]
Posted by Mark Liberman at August 11, 2007 11:34 AM