2024 was a year chock-full of iconic phrases, from “bleach blonde bad-built butch body” to “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” But according to the experts at Yale University, one quote looms large above them all: a dig against vice president-elect JD Vance from one of the world’s biggest pop stars.
On Wednesday, Yale released its annual list of the year’s top 10 notable quotations. At the top was Taylor Swift’s iconic sign-off to her endorsement of Kamala Harris: “Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady.”
Swift was referencing Vance’s infamous 2021 comment that America was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
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Swift’s endorsement instantly went viral, and with it, her tongue-in-cheek diss on Vance’s misogynistic rhetoric. It was impactful enough to top Yale’s list, which Fred Shapiro, the list’s editor and an associate director at the Yale Law Library, said is mostly about cultural relevance.
“Please note that the items on this list are not necessarily eloquent or admirable quotations, rather they have been picked because they are famous or important or particularly revealing of the spirit of our times,” Shapiro said.
The rest of the list reflects that, too. At #2 is Joe Biden’s pardon for his son Hunter, and at #3 is Donald Trump’s assertion that immigrants in Ohio were “eating the cats.” See the full list from the Associated Press.
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