YADDA, YADDA, YADDA

• Share

During the fall campaign, Bob Dole said on TV that General Motors has been replaced as the nation's largest employer by a temp agency, and he asked, "That's a good economy? I don't think so." You don't have to be running for President to be fond of tossing off that pat rejoinder. The police in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, reported that when they ordered a young scofflaw to approach their squad car, he replied, "I don't think so," and tried to run. (The cops caught him by his fanny pack.)

If pols and petty criminals use the same buzzphrases these days, they probably get them from TV, like everyone else. One week on Friends, when David Schwimmer's all-thumbs buddies offered to baby-sit his infant son, he said, "I don't think so"; an hour later, Jerry Seinfeld told an unctuous magician who asked to borrow him for a trick, "I don't think so."

Oh, pulleeze. Don't even think about telling me. I hate when that happens. Get over it. These phrases from hell are history. I'll be their worst nightmare. Yeah, right. As if. Hel-lo-oh!

Every day, Americans are belting out more of these ready-made, media-marinated catchphrases, usually of the in-your-face (to use another) variety. Conversations, movies, E-mail, ads, lovers' quarrels, punditry and stand-up comedy can barely be conducted without resort to an annoyingly popular riposte. A random gleaning, from just one Cybill episode on CBS, produced: Hel-lo-oh!; Oh, pulleeze; Get a life; Yadda yadda; Yesss! and Haven't we had enough fun yet?

These pop phrases are not just cliches. They're more like a bad case of televisionary Tourette's--snappy, canned punch lines that bring the rhythms of sitcom patter into everyday experience. Whether originating from Valley Girls, drag queens or CEOs, these phrases, once they're disseminated by the media, become part of our shared response to the little frustrations of modern life. More and more, that response tends to be a dismissive pique, as these buzzbarbs--expressed with just the right inflections--verbally roll up the window on any nuisance that might come tapping at the tinted glass.

TV and movies have catapulted catchphrases before--Get Smart launched Would you believe...? and Sorry about that into nationwide use in the 1970s--but this newer slang is different. It is supposed to confer upon its users an edge, sometimes a comedic but always a faintly combative edge. The era of Saturday Night Live that dished out Dennis Miller's "I'm outta here" and Dana Carvey's "Isn't that special?" fed a hunger for a renewable supply of ironic put-downs. But what may have started as a boomer/Xer shtick has now become a reflex common to all ages, from Bob Dole to Macaulay Culkin (who gave I don't think so its big push by uttering it twice in the top box-office hit of 1990, Home Alone). The militia code name for a possible counterattack on the feds? "Project Worst Nightmare." The would-be zinger in the G.O.P.'s last-minute ads warning against Democratic control of both Congress and the White House? "Been there, done that."