Their Oops? We'll Hear It Again and Again.

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 31, 2007

We talk a lot in this country -- free speech and all that -- and almost none of it is remembered. Talk shows. Blowhards. Scripted political blather. But once in a great while, someone says something truly memorable.

How can you forget this November gem from presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani?

Telling New Hampshire voters how he cleaned up New York city's tawdry streets while mayor, the Rudester said: "I took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large extent."

Well.

One of the things that humans do is collect things, and quotations that confront the human condition are among the oldest collectibles. They're free, they're easy to store, they cost little to maintain and when you pop one out in conversation, you can come across as profound. (Or just pompous. See: Will, George.)

So to save you the trouble, we've done the collecting for you! The Style List of the Top Five Quotes of 2007, suitable for framing!

You'll notice that these are all off-the-cuff remarks, instead of excerpts from prepared speeches, which is the trend these days, says Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations and an associate librarian at that university. Decades ago, Americans went for the inspiring, the profound, the artistic. "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." "I have a dream." "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." For sheer nihilism, there were Gary Gilmore's final words before a Utah firing squad, ending the national moratorium on the death penalty: "Let's do it."

But these days, people tend to favor the absurd, the notorious, the goofy. (There are exceptions. Todd Beamer's unforgettable last words on hijacked United Flight 93: "Let's roll.") But mostly it's all down-market irony and cynicism and the just plain cringe-inducing. "I'm the decider." "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

"It says something about our times that the top quotes of every year are the ones that are ridiculous," Shapiro says. "People say things now just to be outrageous or offensive, like Ann Coulter saying last year of the 9-11 widows, 'I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much.' . . . Our political and cultural life has declined in a lot of ways."

To lodge in the pop cultural id, a year's-best remark for the Style list must work on several levels.

It has to catch something of the zeitgeist. It must reveal something of the speaker. It must be pithy, funny, inspiring, mean or appalling. It must resonate with the populace, and preferably say something about the larger society.

The best of these can become cultural reference points, says Grant Barrett, vice president of the American Dialect Society and host of the syndicated radio show "A Way With Words."

"When people repeat these, you're essentially repeating a joke," he says. "Largely, these are not new meanings of old terms. You're referring to a well-known event and getting humor from using it in a new situation."

Nobody knows which ones will last, he points out, because it's often passing time and subsequent events that lend the remark the appropriate level of irony, tragedy or humor to endure.

First, let's look at a couple of nominees that didn't quite make the finals.

The winner in the category of "Things That Only a Lawyer Could Say," for example, was: "What we have here is a desperate woman who wants to have a conversation with another woman."

This was Donald Lykkebak, astronaut Lisa Nowak's attorney, describing her 950-mile, diaper-clad expedition to confront her boyfriend's girlfriend with a steel mallet, a knife and pepper spray in an airport parking lot at 3 in the morning.

This gets points for being (a) ridiculous, (b) part of a national news story and (c) a reference to the iconic line from "Cool Hand Luke": "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

But it's just not zippy.

Coming closer, the Hunter S. Thompson Memorial Fear and Loathing Award goes to the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards. Speaking of his late father, the cremated Bert, Richards told a British magazine he mixed Dad's ashes with some cocaine, then snorted the concoction up his nose.

"I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. . . . It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Well, okay, this was one occasion in which someone did inhale, but Richards is so weird -- the man fell out of a coconut tree -- that it doesn't get quite enough separation from your standard rock-star debauchery.

But thanks for playing, Keith, and hope your head feels better!

So enough preliminaries! Let's get to the countdown!

THE 2007 STYLE SECTION TOP 5 QUOTES OF THE YEAR:

5. "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children."

-- Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen South Carolina, in the Miss Teen USA pageant, airing live on NBC. The 18-year-old was asked why one-fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a blank world map. She later said she was flustered by the question.

Judge's note: Nobody expects beauty queens to be profound (see also: professional athletes, rock stars) but this one gets points for being an indictment of the same American educational system that was the basis of the original question. The video clip became a mean-spirited YouTube sensation, which prompted a backlash of support for Upton, who then went on the morning talk shows to give her more formal (and entirely forgettable) answer.

4. "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

-- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during a question-and-answer session at Columbia University.

Judge's note: Ahmadinejad, apparently trying to wrest the Most Homophobic President title from Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, appears so out of touch with reality that his remark does something he didn't intend: It tells us far more about him than it does about Iranian society. "It's so out there that I don't even know that it's homophobic," says Shapiro. "It says more about his delusions than it does gay people or Iranians." Given that this is a man who wants nuclear warheads, his delusions are important. And scary.

3. "That's some nappy-headed hos there."

-- Radio host Don Imus, describing his perception of the Rutgers women's basketball team.

Judge's note: Perhaps the most unforgettable thing anyone said this year. Odious, racist, appalling, it led to a national fireball of a discussion on race, misogyny and the firing of Imus. It was a temporary setback; Imus was hired by another network later in the year, though with black cast members and a subdued attitude.

2. "He has a wide stance."

-- Sgt. Dave Karsnia of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport police, summarizing Idaho Sen. Larry Craig's explanation of their June 11 bathroom stall encounter.

Judge's note: Perhaps the clearest addition to American slang this year. Craig was arrested on charges of lewd conduct, as the plainclothes officer said Craig was soliciting bathroom sex by sliding his foot from one stall to the adjacent one, touching Karsnia's in the process. This also takes the "Most Misquoted Quote Award." Just as Bogie never said "Play it again, Sam," Craig never said he had a wide stance. He actually said, "I'm a fairly wide guy," in the tape-recorded conversation with the officer. People liked it better the other way -- Google records about 104,000 Internet hits for "Larry Craig" and "wide stance" but just over 900 for "Larry Craig" and "wide guy." "Once it reaches a certain point, what he actually said doesn't matter," says Barrett. "Linguistically, you can never say 'wide stance' innocently again."

1. "Whoop-de-damn-do."

-- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, quoting his own reaction to being told the Senate had confirmed his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Judge's note: This is a Shakespearean moment, if not quite rendered with the Bard's eloquence.

If you're a fan of Thomas, it reads as a devastating remark of despair: A black man in America rises from humble circumstances to the pinnacle of achievement after enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (also known as the confirmation process), only to become so disillusioned that the mountaintop no longer means anything. Tragedy, pathos, injustice. Wow. If you're not inclined to care for Thomas, it reads as the flippant remark of a bitter man, plucked from relative obscurity by a cynical president, to undermine the legacy of an icon (Thurgood Marshall). Worse, Thomas relates in his autobiography, he uttered the remark while sitting in the tub -- he didn't even want to get out of the bath! -- and pouting. Wow again.

So that's it for this year. Thanks for coming, everyone. And remember: Keep a wide stance, Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch America, don't worry about The Iraq or Don Imus, and if there are homosexuals in Iran, well, whoop-de-damn-do!