When you’re exceptionally close with another person, you start to develop your own sort of language. It might be based on reminiscence of times spent together or inside jokes that you’ve developed over the years, but this kind of coded language that can only be understood by those on the inside becomes a kind of literal love language. For me, I find this kind of love language permeating every conversation I have, to the point where I often have to bite my tongue in order to adhere to social graces in conversations with strangers.
“Do you know what that’s from?” “That was from this video of XYZ…” are phrases that I say more times than is probably normal, but they’re almost always met with the phrase that titles this issue of Locomag: “I don’t get the reference.”
Upon examination I realized that my constant referral to pop culture is a result of a lot of hours of consumption. My sister and I spent years together in front of a TV screen or a movie screen or sharing videos, all with the common knowledge of the source material. We’d repeat jokes to each other, or liken our real lives to “that time on Futurama when…” This became our coded love language, the language of reference.
We still refer to the shows and movies we grew up watching with each other, inserting X reference into conversation, knowing the other person will immediately understand. This has translated into my relationships outside of my family, too. I’ve been told that it’s either a great asset or a confusing flaw that I treat pop culture like a rolodex of jokes and references to be brought out whenever real life necessitates. To me, I can immediately identify a real-life situation that reminds me of this movie, that TV show, this music video, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and referencing it bridges a gap of understanding in my mind.
Like any language, the language of reference is a means to understand one another. When someone picks up on a reference that I’m making, especially the obscure ones, I feel like the connection and understanding is much deeper, far deeper than could be accomplished by simply telling you about something without mentioning a cartoon.
If I throw out 15 references in a conversation and only one of them sticks, then it will still have been worth the failed attempts. This coded language grows once it’s understood. The more you keep at it, the more you consume pop culture together, the more these references make sense, and the more layered a conversation can be.
This is why I think of the language of reference as a new language entirely. Referring back to something that the other person understands creates a shared memory, one which requires the participation of both people involved. When I mention a stupid (and probably unfunny) joke from American Dad to my sister, the conversation and the reference only works because both of us understand it, and the more we watched together as kids the more we became fluent in our own coded language.
“I don’t get the reference” might be something I hear a lot and maybe you hear it more often than you think, but for every reference that goes misunderstood, there’s one that gets caught, growing a more personal and deeper language between two people.
