You can get really deep - or really strange - as college students while drinking coffee deep into the night. During my 4 years at Southern Illinois University, my closest friends and I spent many a night over appetizer samplers and strong coffee, rambling about all manner of topics.
One night - and I don't recall if this was a "coffee at Denny's" night or a "wine coolers at the park" night or a "diet Coke at my house" night - my friend Pablo and I were pondering the act of coining a phrase.
You know, those hip sayings that get made popular by a movie or recording - they have to have originated somewhere. Someone, somewhere had to be the first to say it, and their friends heard it and picked up on it, and somewhere along the line it was overheard by a writer who plugged it into a script, and next thing you know everyone's saying it.
We wanted to coin a phrase. We figured when it ended up in a movie script, we'd have accomplished something. But it needed to be unique enough that we'd recognize it as being "our phrase" when it cropped up as the next new hot thing. So we thought long and hard, and finally decided on a sufficiently unique saying.
I'll beat you like a blue moose on Thursday.
No, we weren't on illegal drugs at the time. Although I might have been under the influence of allergy medicine.
I can't even remember why we thought this was a phrase that might catch on. We did our best, though, over the next several months to work it into conversations. At Cornerstone Festival 1993, we even made a sign for my 4-man tent proclaiming it "The Elvis Press Tent" (my traditional name to help folks identify my tent among the throng) and "Blue Moose Emporium". Everyone who questioned the name was treated to our proposed new "in" phrase.
Eleven years later, the "blue moose on Thursday" has not made its way into popular culture. But, through the power of the Internet, it may yet make its way to the ranks of catch phrases and oft-repeated movie quotes. Or... maybe it's time to pick a new phrase to coin.
Great phrase. I'm sure we can get everyone saying it.
There was an Australian comedian by the name of Adam Hills who had a similar idea and came up with the phrase "Go you big red fire engine". He started using it at all his shows and whenever he appeared in a media interview.
Try doing a Google search on his phrase and I think you'll be surprised.
Anyway, gotta go now. I've got to go and work out a way of using 'I'll beat you like a blue moose on Thursday' in my radio programme tomorrow.
Posted by: Rodney Olsen | October 20, 2004 at 06:31 AM
It's already had one mention on-air today in Perth, Western Australia. :)
Posted by: Rodney Olsen | October 20, 2004 at 05:46 PM