...have half-lives
Catchphrase Wikipedia
The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases (2003) is on order, but one wonders what 20 years has done to the corpus.
List of catchphrases in American and British mass media Wikipedia
"Eat my shorts" -Bart Simpson
25 movie catchphrases that have endured in pop culture
100 Famous TV Catch Phrases (pdf)
Eric Cartman's Best Quotes In South Park, Ranked
Consider this vignette:
That phrase "Are the other plans secure?" almost seems like something out of Dr. Strangelove or 2001. Sometimes a phrase or word gets raised to a motif, from which it might become a bandied-about catchphrase —an example that captures the essence of meme, a lexical item that propagates, and finds uses in discourse. People hear it, understand/grok its signification, and add it to their repertoire, to be trotted out when ...called for.
The fate of catchphrases is ...to pass out of use, and go to live in dictionaries of catchphrases, where they are secure, well-cared-for, and out of harm's way. I suspect that they somehow inhabit Dunmanifestin, the Rest Home of the Discworld gods. Perhaps they are whispers and echoes —they are certainly Beings in Time (maybe even of Time)
In the waking world there are always new catchphrases and memes and slang erupting like mushrooms after rain, from the glorious lexical mycelium beneath the ground of our perception...
from the Introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases Anna Farkas:
"Don't have a cow, man!"
-Bart Simpson
"Respect my authority" is arguably the quote that is most linked with Cartman. This quote, which was first said in Season 2 of South Park, has been repeated throughout the show. In fact, the popularity of this quote has even extended beyond the shows' viewers into the general public, with many associating this quote with Cartman even if they haven't seen the show, themselves."Screw You Guys, I'm Going Home!"
...the curious duality of catchphrases. There is an undeniable ephemerality to them—David Crystal has characterized them as language 'on the wing'. But for people exposed to them at an impressionable time of life—generally speaking, in youth or early adulthood—they stick in a corner of the mind, and cataloging someone's mental hoard of catchphrases is almost as reliable a diagnostic of their age and interests as counting the growth-rings is in determining the age of a tree. (vii)