TVSquad

If you haven't heard, the country is in a recession and things are getting bad. I spend every afternoon watching CNBC and weeping. My father, who deals in real estate, calls me every night just to scream and babble incoherently. My wife splits her time between loading up the Model T to head out west Californee-way and burning our quarterly financial statements for warmth.

We're on an economic roller coaster right now, and I don't mean a reputable roller coaster like at Six Flags. We're talking one of those death-trap coasters that even the carnies won't ride. The depressing thing is that the whole bag of crap we're in right now just seemed to come out of nowhere, like the last season of Roseanne. How did we get here? Why is this all happening now?

You might be tempted to blame the usual suspects: the president, the congress, the Stone-Cutters. But you'd be wrong. The real culprit behind this whole problems is Friends.

Originally I was going to list the best catchphrases in general, not limiting my choices to single words. But, as we only list five in our The Five posts, I knew early on that it would be a near impossible task to list only five favorites. So, here we have it, the five best single-word catchphrases of popular TV characters.

1. "Aeyyy!" OK, so technically this isn't a "word," but you can't deny the popularity of the trademark call of coolness from the one and only Fonz of Happy Days.