There comes a time in every Sex and the City fan’s life when you have to wonder: why the hell does Carrie talk like that? Oh, don’t hide behind your enormous fabric flower like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know exactly what I’m talking about! The little quips! The constant rhetorical questions! The periodic detours into schmaltz that sound more like lyrics to a song your parents listen to while they have sex than something a smart, hip, alleged professional writer would ever dream of saying (please, try and convince me that “But if you love someone and break up, where does the love go?” is not the title of a mid-period Boyz II Men song).

Did I mention the quips?? I’m sure I did, but I’d love to mention them again, because they are the part of this show that regularly shakes me to my core. The quips! “A woman’s right to shoes,” just thrown out there, as if you were simply remarking upon the weather?! If you talked like this in real life, your friends would perform a citizen’s arrest on you, and they would be right to.

But on SATC, shoe/ reproductive rights puns are more than just part of the show’s basic fabric — the show’s language is one of the things that instantly separates it from every other show on television. When you want to parody Sex and the City, you don’t focus on the funky spunk or Miranda eating a trash cake. You focus on the totally unique ways the characters talk to each other about totally ordinary things (like semen and trash cake).