(Credits: Far Out / 20th Century Fox / Matt Groening)
It’s become a popular conspiracy theory to state how The Simpsons has the ability to eerily predict the future. Still, the cultural impact of the titular clan extends far beyond its inadvertent prescience.
Several high-profile creative figures within the show have regularly remarked on its innate capacity to foresee events that don’t come to pass for years, lending it credence or incredulousness along the way, depending on the situation. Not just that, Springfield’s first family quietly managed to infiltrate everyday conversation without a lot of people noticing.
It takes a brave soul to even attempt to read the dictionary from front to back, especially when the list of terms expands on an annual basis. However, regardless of anyone’s familiarity with the increasingly voluminous tome, there aren’t many TV shows to have made a mark on the English language’s foremost collection of everyday terms than Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa. Even after 35 years on the airwaves, Maggie still doesn’t speak. Otherwise, she’d have no doubt come up with a couple of soundbites of her own, too.
When pressed to name a single word more closely associated with The Simpsons than any other, Homer’s exasperated and conversationally malleable “D’oh” is more often than not the one that comes to mind first. Is it dictionary-acceptable, though? As it turns out, yes, it is, having been part of the Merriam-Webster edition of the book since as far back as 2001.
A single episode was responsible for two, with the classic 1996 instalment ‘Lisa the Iconoclast’ following the spiky-haired intellectual as she discovers the legend of Jeremiah Springfield is entirely fabricated. Hailed as Springfield’s founder and most iconic historical figure, his quote of “a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man” was intended to be nonsense, but ’embiggens’ made it into the dictionary nonetheless.
In a mind-melting slice of self-awareness, two characters debate whether or not embiggens is even a word, to which one responds by saying that “it’s a perfectly cromulent word”. Again, grammatical nonsense at the time, but still enough to be absorbed into the Merriam-Webster dictionary years down the line.
In 2015, “meh” was lifted from The Simpsons and dropped into the dictionary, too. Did Matt Groening and company come up with the three-letter illustration of ambivalence? Nobody seems to know, but it did crop up in a number of episodes, and nobody else came forward to claim responsibility, so it’ll forever be associated with Homer and his unruly relatives by default.
The borderline blasphemous “Jeebus” is in what the dictionary describes as “a humorous re-spelling of the name of Jesus (often used as an exclamation expressing irritation, dismay, or surprise)”. The portmanteau of “avoision” also made the cut after news anchor Kent Brockman smashed avoidance and evasion together to send the veteran newsman into the Oxford English Dictionary as a result.
Last but by no means least, the self-explanatory “craptacular” was deemed to be a real word thanks to The Simpsons, who by extension have almost certainly been responsible for more violent Scrabble arguments that leave a trail of scattered tiles and broken friendships in their wake than any other fictional family in history.
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