YADDA, YADDA, YADDA

During the fall campaign, Bob Dole said on TV that General Motors has been replaced as the nation’s largest employer by a temp agency, and he asked, “That’s a good economy? I don’t think so.” You don’t have to be running for President to be fond of tossing off that pat rejoinder. The police in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, reported that when they ordered a young scofflaw to approach their squad car, he replied, “I don’t think so,” and tried to run. (The cops caught him by his fanny pack.)

If pols and petty criminals use the same buzzphrases these days, they probably get them from TV, like everyone else. One week on Friends, when David Schwimmer’s all-thumbs buddies offered to baby-sit his infant son, he said, “I don’t think so”; an hour later, Jerry Seinfeld told an unctuous magician who asked to borrow him for a trick, “I don’t think so.”

Oh, pulleeze. Don’t even think about telling me. I hate when that happens. Get over it. These phrases from hell are history. I’ll be their worst nightmare. Yeah, right. As if. Hel-lo-oh!

Every day, Americans are belting out more of these ready-made, media-marinated catchphrases, usually of the in-your-face (to use another) variety. Conversations, movies, E-mail, ads, lovers’ quarrels, punditry and stand-up comedy can barely be conducted without resort to an annoyingly popular riposte. A random gleaning, from just one Cybill episode on CBS, produced: Hel-lo-oh!; Oh, pulleeze; Get a life; Yadda yadda; Yesss! and Haven’t we had enough fun yet?

These pop phrases are not just cliches. They’re more like a bad case of televisionary Tourette’s–snappy, canned punch lines that bring the rhythms of sitcom patter into everyday experience. Whether originating from Valley Girls, drag queens or CEOs, these phrases, once they’re disseminated by the media, become part of our shared response to the little frustrations of modern life. More and more, that response tends to be a dismissive pique, as these buzzbarbs–expressed with just the right inflections–verbally roll up the window on any nuisance that might come tapping at the tinted glass.

TV and movies have catapulted catchphrases before–Get Smart launched Would you believe…? and Sorry about that into nationwide use in the 1970s–but this newer slang is different. It is supposed to confer upon its users an edge, sometimes a comedic but always a faintly combative edge. The era of Saturday Night Live that dished out Dennis Miller’s “I’m outta here” and Dana Carvey’s “Isn’t that special?” fed a hunger for a renewable supply of ironic put-downs. But what may have started as a boomer/Xer shtick has now become a reflex common to all ages, from Bob Dole to Macaulay Culkin (who gave I don’t think so its big push by uttering it twice in the top box-office hit of 1990, Home Alone). The militia code name for a possible counterattack on the feds? “Project Worst Nightmare.” The would-be zinger in the G.O.P.’s last-minute ads warning against Democratic control of both Congress and the White House? “Been there, done that.”

A whole nation barking Hollywood retorts–creepy but all too useful. In the daily battlefield of misunderstandings and impatient busyness, such locutions as Don’t go there, In your dreams and What part of no don’t you understand? are Nerf-like weaponry: When you’re blind with anger or exasperation, you grab the nearest item of modular meanness. Of course, not all coolster coinages are overtly fightin’ words. Indeed, some affect affectlessness: Same old, same old; Blah blah blah; Yadda yadda yadda. But given the right nuances, indifference can pack a wallop: Yadda will outsnide blah, for instance but wither before the passive-aggressive champ (and Bob Dole favorite), Whatever.

Even if these phrases were the nastiest bomb mots on earth, who’d want a civilization without frequent hits of wicked wit? The real reason modular meanness grates isn’t the meanness–it’s the modularness.

Whether biting or benign, what these supposedly trenchant comebacks have in common is the roar of a phantom crowd; they always speak of other people having spoken them. It’s as if they come with a built-in laugh track. And keeping us on track, they provoke in us click responses, the sort of electronic-entertainment reaction we twitch and jerk to more often lately. We hear Not even close, He’s history or What’s wrong with this picture?, and we immediately sense the power structure of the moment. In fact, we may subconsciously applaud such speakers because they’ve hypertexted our little lives right into Friends, Seinfeld or the “I love you, man” ads, and for a moment, at least, we know perfectly how to relate to people, deal with conflict and banish discomfort. Not being in control–that’s our real worst nightmare.

Think about it. For all the references to thinking–I don’t think so, no-brainer, clueless, all the brain surgeons and rocket scientists you don’t have to be, and the injunction on some New York City street signs, “Don’t even think of parking here”–isn’t the real message of these phrases simply, Don’t even think?

Duh.