Why do we quote movies?\u00a0 I often think about this fascination we have as a culture to repeat and relive moments from our favorite films.\u00a0 Large number of clips exist on YouTube devoted to capturing that magical moment when a character utters an unforgettable line.\u00a0 But why? What is it that drives us to remember a great line or identify with the person who uttered a quote?<\/p>\n
This question came up over the dinner table one night and, as I reflected on this question, my thoughts were drawn to an explanation about speed reading that I had once come across.\u00a0 The author went to great trouble to make the point that that the trick to speed reading was to see groups of words in a sentence as a single chunk of information.<\/p>\n
To understand that point, consider the words you read in a sentence. To make it concrete, let\u2019s take the word \u2018understand\u2019.\u00a0 When you read the word \u2018understand\u2019, you are seeing a group of 11 individual letters, but are you really conscious of each letter at a time?\u00a0 Do you really see a \u2018u\u2019 followed by an \u2018n\u2019 followed by a \u2018d\u2019 and so on?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 What each of us with any sophistication in reading accomplishes is to perceive these 11 letters as a unit that conveys the word \u2018understand\u2019.\u00a0 Of course, this is why we can read a sentence with a misspelling quite comfortably and often we may not even notice.<\/p>\n
This idea of chunking and clumping comfortably scales upward to where common phrases can be consumed with a glance without a detailed examination of the individual words.\u00a0 Two common approaches are to either abbreviate the phrase into some short form.\u00a0 Expressions like \u2018LOL\u2019 or \u2018BTW\u2019 or any of the other text and chat speak concepts are excellent examples.\u00a0 The other approach is to pick lyrical or repetitive expressions to encapsulate a phrase.\u00a0 The famous \u2018rosy-fingered dawn\u2019 from the Homeric epics or \u2018ready, set, go!\u2019 are examples of these kinds, respectively.<\/p>\n
But there is an even more compelling approach \u2013 the concept of the metaphor.\u00a0 The idea here being that we liken an object to another object, one with well-known properties.\u00a0 The properties of the second object are then inherited by the first simply by the equating of the name.\u00a0 Some examples of this include the following sentences.<\/p>\n
I think that our desire to quote movies is indicative of this.\u00a0 That by repeating the dialog of the movie, the quote itself becomes a cultural metaphor for the feelings and experiences expressed in the movie.\u00a0 This idea was brilliantly explored in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok<\/a>.<\/p>\n In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise are coaxed into a meeting with a Tamarian ship in orbit around a mostly unexplored planet.\u00a0 Despite their universal translator, no ship of the Federation had ever been able to crack the Tamarian language.\u00a0 The words themselves could be translated, but the syntax and context seemed to be utterly devoid of meaning.\u00a0 The Tamarian captain, Dathon, seeing that this meeting was no different from previous encounters and that the ordinary avenues for communication were not working, arranged for himself and Captain Picard to be trapped on a planet.<\/p>\n On that planet, both captains were confronted by a dangerous creature.\u00a0 This shared danger spurred a meeting of the minds and eventual understanding dawned on Picard.\u00a0 The Tamarian race thought and communicated in metaphors.\u00a0 They would say statements like \u2018Tember, his arms wide\u2019 to mean the concept of giving or generosity.\u00a0 Back on the Enterprise, the crew had also come to a similar epiphany.\u00a0 By analogy, they constructed a Tamarian-like way of expressing romance by saying \u2018Juliet on her balcony\u2019, but they lamented that without the proper context, in this case Shakespeare\u2019s tragic play about Romeo and Juliet, one didn\u2019t know who Juliet was and why she was on her balcony.<\/p>\n The episode closes with Dathon dying from the wounds inflicted by the creature, and with Picard arriving back aboard the Enterprise just in time to make peace between the Tamarians and the Federation by speaking their language.<\/p>\n