Pop culture is responsible for many sayings that people quote: “Inconceivable!” “He’s dead, Jim!” “Make it so!” “You’ve been chopped.”

(Of these, “Inconceivable!” and its follow-up, “I do not think that word means what you think it means,” are perhaps the most useful in everyday conversation. But I digress.)

But if you ask me (no one did), the best source for memorable quotations would have to be The Simpsons, which today airs its 800th episode. Some of these bon mots have even made it into our family vocabulary.

Bart was on his way home from Sunday School when Marge admonished him for saying hell. Bart’s reply? “I sure as hell can’t tell you we learned about hell unless I say ‘hell,’ can I? Hell, hell, hell, hell!” Now, whenever one of us says “hell,” the other jumps right into the quote.

Then there’s Homer. After a lesson on fire safety, He sings, “When a fire starts to burn/There’s a lesson you must learn./Something, something, then you’ll see/You’ll avoid catastrophe. D’oh!” Dan forgets lyrics often, and some older songs I just don’t know. We often end up saying, “Something, something. D’oh.”

(I understand that in the Simpsons’ scripts, “D’oh” is indicated by “annoyed grunt.” But I digress.)

One particularly important exchange for Dan and me starts when the characters are standing around the statue of Jebediah Springfield, the town founder and local hero. The legend on his statue reads, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” Someone inquires whether “embiggen” is a real word. Mrs. Krabappel, the teacher, replies, “It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

(I would think the meanings of “embiggen” and “cromulent” should be clear from context, but let’s take a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, where both are defined. “Embiggen” means “make bigger or more expansive.” And M-W defines “cromulent” as “acceptable; satisfactory.” What’s even more amazing is that autocorrect didn’t balk at either one when I typed them just now. But I digress again.)

(Just as a digression (to a digression), Dan and I use “embiggen” all the time, almost daily. Because of my various injuries and operations, I can’t climb the stairs to where the bedroom is. So we bought a chair that expands into a single bed and collapses back into a chair. I ask Dan to embiggen the bed in the evening and dis-embiggen it in the morning. But I digress some more.)

Then there’s Grampa Simpson. He has a technique for answering intrusive questions. He goes into a totally irrelevant soliloquy. Like this:

“Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. ‘Gimme five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time….”

(Sociolinguist Suzette Haden Elgin recommended this tactic as well. She could also shut down awkward conversations by saying, “Well, you can’t tell which way the train is going by looking at the tracks.” But I digress yet again.)

Let’s finish with Marge. In one episode, she went away for a self-care day, indulged in a bubble bath, and called room service:

“I’d like a banana fudge sundae. With whipped cream! And some chocolate chip cheesecake. And a bottle of tequila!”

(We don’t use this one in conversation, but once when I had to write something on self-care, I worked it in as an example of what self-care isn’t. But I digress even more.)

Thus has our vocabulary been enriched by a cartoon show. (I also like the episode in which Ned Flanders complains to Principal Skinner that he doesn’t want Darwinian evolution taught at school, and Skinner replies, “You mean Lamarckian evolution?” It doesn’t fit into any conversation I’ve ever had, but it cracks me up every time. And this is my final digression for this week.)