Long before the internet meme, there was the catch phrase.  The Fonz with his thumbs-up “hey” or Joey Tribiani’s “how you doing?”  The Full House “how rude” or the Family Matters “did I do that?”  Catch phrases showed up in TV, radio, and (perhaps especially) commercials.

Some phrases, though, resided primarily in the conversational lexicon more than on the TV screen.  A great example: get a life.  We all said it.  We all thought it.  And, according to Douglas Coupland, it’s a phrase you don’t here at all these days.  He writes about in the broader context of boredom (or our lack of it in the 21st century).  From his recent Financial Times column:

In the 1990s there was that expression, “Get a life!” You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread and, by saying “Get a life!”, you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and join the rest of us who were still out in the world taking walks and contemplating trees and birds. The expression made sense at the time but it’s been years since I’ve heard anyone use it anywhere. What did it mean then, “getting a life”? Did we all get one? Or maybe we’ve all not got lives any more — and calling attention to one person without a life would put the spotlight on all of humanity and our now full-time pursuit of minutiae, details and tangential idea threads.

It’s an interesting question to pose: did we stop saying it because we followed our own advice?  Or have things gone the other way?  I think it’s definitely worth thinking about and most assuredly worth casting some kind of vision for.

You can read the rest of Coupland’s article here (though the site might ask you to answer a question or two before reading).