They say they can measure the distinctiveness of the memorable phrase by seeing how likely various-sized segments of it turn up in the corpus. Give it a go–I got 9 correct out of 12.They then compared the memorable phrases with a standard corpus of common language phrases taken from 1967, making it unlikely to contain phrases from modern films. On average, people chose correctly about 75 percent of the time, confirming the idea that the memorable features are inherent in the lines themselves and not the result of some other factor, such as the length of the lines or their location in the film.The test is available for anybody to try here. Science because they involve the dissemination of earlier published data.They then asked individuals who had not seen the films to guess which of the two lines was the memorable one.

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and co say it may even be useful in the real world. So if they have the same properties that the team found in memorable movie phrases, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil assumes they must be on to something.Sure enough, these catchphrases generally have the same properties–they express general ideas in a simple way using unusual combinations of words.That’s an interesting study that points to a number of interesting new lines of research. These are all features that tend to make phrases general rather than specific.So memorable phrases contain generic pearls of wisdom expressed with unusual combinations of words in ordinary sentences.Finally, these guys test their results by measuring how catchphrases used in adverts and marketing campaigns measure up in the same tests.These are phrases that are deliberately intended to be memorable. By contrast, memorable phrases tend to use very ordinary grammatical structures that are highly likely to turn up in the corpus.They also found that memorable phrases tend to use pronouns (other than you), the indefinite article a rather than the definite article the, and verbs in the past rather than present tense. The phrases themselves turn out to be significantly distinctive, meaning they’re made up of combinations of words that are unlikely to appear in the corpus.

That may help rule out poor catchphrases (although it would also rule out a certain proportion of good ones).It may also be interesting to see how memorable phrases have changed over the years.But what it doesn’t tell you is the pearl of wisdom the memorable phrase should deliver in the first place.Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1203.

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