…the study’s authors compiled scripts from 1,000 movies, and identified, using IMDb, Google and Bing, the lines from those movies that are quoted and remembered the most today.
They paired each memorable line with other lines of similar length, voiced by the same character in the same scene, then ran each pair through a computer program to identify linguistic trends.
“Our goal is to understand what general features of language will tell you how memorable a quote will be,” fifth-year Ph.D. student Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, one of the study’s authors…
Applicability doesn’t surprise Fred Shapiro, the editor of the “Yale Book of Quotations.”
“A lot of the quotes that last can be used in everyday life,” he told the Huffington Post. “Some can even have a life after the film they’re from gets forgotten.”
Shapiro is less sure that unusual word choice helps a quote stick in audiences’ minds. He cited quotes from “Casablanca” (“Play it again, Sam.”)…
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Which — as everyone BUT the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations AND the writer at HuffPo knows — was never uttered in Casablanca.
