Getting It

Since pop culture references have come up recently in these parts, it seems like a good time to dive into it a little more. I've yet to find a really good website for that topic, but let me describe what it might look like if it existed:

Imagine a site that, like Wikipedia, allowed its users to maintain it, since pop culture is notoriously fickle and ever-changing. There you'd be able to search on any sort of keywords that you might have heard but not know the source, or even meaning, of (e.g. "jumped the shark", "Charlie don't surf", "I hate spunk!", "Norm!!", "Where's the beef?", "He's dead, Jim", "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", "I see dead people", "I'll have whatever she's having", "Oops! I did it again", "no shit, Sherlock", "Me Tarzan, you Jane", etc., etc., etc.) and be presented with data like: its origin (if known), when it first came into popular usage, most famous places it's been used (i.e. the PopCultRefs) and possibly variants that have shown up over time.

Now I know you can probably get most of that by simply doing a Google/Yahoo search and then following a few links until you've compiled the results you need. But wouldn't it be great if they were all in one place? Wikipedia's the closest I've found, but it's not perfect by any stretch.

And really, to my analytical mind, you never really get something like that until you understand how it started off. I guarantee you that "jumped the shark" means more to me, having endured that old episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie set out to literally jump a shark and feeling at the time like the show had reached a new low, than it does to someone who's simply told about it. But, by the same token, at least the person who's heard the story has some chance of using it correctly, as opposed to the wannabe who's just copying what he or she heard with no idea of the original context.

So shouldn't there be a site for this?