‘I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!’: A Guide to Proper Usage

Grub Street’s Josh Ozersky writes to Vulture:

We have no doubt that “I drink your milkshake,� the volcanically dramatic, mind-bendingly cool line with which Daniel Plainview devastates his enemy in There Will Be Blood’s final sequence, will soon enter the pop-culture catchphrase lexicon, nestling alongside such former lazy-writer tropes as “I see dead people,� “Say hello to my little friend,� “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,� and all the rest. Personally, we would like to see a federal law passed preventing this from happening. “I drink your milkshake� has such Dickensian grandeur that its miniaturization in the mouths of SportsCenter anchors, scab gag writers, bloggers, and their ilk is practically a national tragedy. Nonetheless, if somebody is going to do it, it’s going to be us. The question is, what is its proper use? What situation demands the milkshake treatment?

As a sports metaphor? (“Let’s face it. The Celtics drank the Knicks’ milkshake last night.�) An amorphously obscene double entendre, hearkening back to its Kelis-ian roots? (“I’d like to drink your milkshake!�) Or maybe, in a nod to the godlike venom of its utterer, a taunt: “You best back down before I drink your milkshake, bitch.� In the end, none of these seem quite right, especially as they all omit the special genius of the line’s coda, a burst of half-mad juvenilia that captures the demented feeling of the scene better even than the line itself: “I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!� Because the child is the father of the man, and the milkshake too. —Josh Ozersky