One of my friends twittered : Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto :Â a little while ago, and it showed up in his Facebook stream. That took me back a while. I had seen that phrase in so many contexts over the years that I began to wonder whether someone had bothered to write a Wikipedia entry for it, given its unusualness.
I wasn’t disappointed; here it is.
I’ve rarely seen a phrase like this, one that migrates into multiple and different cultural contexts. Any better offers? Even the Inigo Montoya quote (the part where he says : Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die). doesn’t quite make it into as many contexts.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Aseem Naphade // Nov 25, 2007 at 5:59 am
Hello Mr JP, i had contacted you for the national debate on urbanization, thanks for your help, we came first ie University of Bombay and i even got the best speaker award….thanks once again
2 JP // Nov 25, 2007 at 9:57 am
Well done Aseem. Delighted to hear it. You worked hard to achieve it.
3 JD // Nov 25, 2007 at 12:02 pm
JP, not sure I have anything to top Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto but I believe that is the source of the name for the Open Source web vulnerability scanner Nikto:
http://www.cirt.net/code/nikto.shtml
4 RB // Nov 26, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Here’s another one. When I “misspelled” it, Google kindly offered:
“Did you mean: Nov schmoz kapop ?”
more at: http://tinyurl.com/234xza
I learned this one from the same source in which I first found out about Gort & Klaatu, which is to say: ZAP Comix in the High ’60s. As to the semantics of the phrase, as Mr. Natural said in a slightly different context: “If you don’t know by now, don’t mess with it!”
5 Bill Barnett // Dec 19, 2007 at 1:50 am
I was especially glad to see that wikipedia included the BEST reuse of K-B-N… Army of Darkness. If you’ve never seen Bruce Campbell failing to remember those magic words in the cemetery of Doom, you’re really missing something.
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