“You may know it from other popular Simpsons’ catchphrases, such as ‘eat my shorts’ and ‘craptacular’”.
Homer Simpson: Influential
Well, that would probably be how Troy McClure would introduce it, but you might know it from mocking yourself (or someone else) after a moment of absent-mindedness.
No wonder then, that Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” has been confirmed as TV-hit, The Simpson’s greatest contribution to the English langauge.
The origins of the word go back as far as 1945, however in the show, Homer was initially scripted to utter an “annoyed grunt”.
A recent study of 300 professional linguists concluded that D’oh!, having worked its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998, was the show’s stand-out contribution to the English language, along with other commonly-used phrases from the show with 37% of votes, along with:
- Introubulate – 13%
- Craptacular – 11%
- Eat my shorts – 10%
- Knowitallism – 9%
- Embiggen – 7%
- Meh – 6%
- Learning juice – 4%
- Cheese-eating surrender monkeys – 3%
- Kwyjibo – 1%
It was also claimed that Homer must be “the most influential wordsmith since Shakespeare”, to which he would (probably) have replied “Meh!”
Other “non-words” from TV that have infiltrated the English language include “go commando”, made famous by Friends (I’d Google the meaning!), “bouncebackability” from Hull City manager, Ian Dowie (though this is, amazingly, disputed) and the now annoying “simples” from a popular car insurance comparison website.
Do you know of any others?