Roots
Flavour of the day
Deepti

This age of instant everything has coined catch phrases that are instant, not lasting. Media feeds the frenzy. KBC or Kaun Banega Crorepati created ‘Lock it’, its second season created ‘Freeze it’ and advertisements constantly churn out gems like ‘it’s different’ or ‘bold ho jaao’. In order to have permanence, catch phrases need to move from specific to wider contexts.

The catch phrase ‘Is this your final answer?’ from the original Who Wants to be a Millionaire? show is used in all kinds of contexts. The host, Chris Tarrant, used this line to add suspense to every question in the quiz and the catch phrase caught on in a big way. It came to be used in every situation that demanded a crucial decision.

‘If anything can go wrong, it will’, this catch phrase is known as Murphy’s Law. Captain Edward Murphy was an engineer working on a US Air Force project. One day in 1949, he lost his temper with a technician and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it." His colleague, Nichols, heard this remark and after changing it to ‘if anything can go wrong, it will’ added it to a list of ‘aerospace laws’ that he was putting together. Murphy’s Law soon flew out of its aerospace slot and joined the mainstream of language.

A current fashion or craze is called ‘flavour of the month/week/day/hour’, which is a catchphrase contributed by an ice cream parlour in the US. From the year 1940 to 1980, the Howard Johnson chain of ice cream parlours would single out a flavour and put up a signboard that proclaimed an ice cream flavour to be the flavour of the day. The ploy worked and the chain flourished, giving English another catch phrase in the process.