Students of 21st century English need a range of literacy practices to interact with and construct meanings from the texts of our culture. Contemporary studies of literary texts encourage exploration of the concept of intertextuality, seeing texts as social events within a cultural context, their meanings understood against a background of other texts of similar kinds. The paper discusses a form of critical discourse analysis that makes possible critical readings of texts of popular culture as contextualised within a particular community. The discussion examines a social dimension of language use where current cultural artefacts such as advertisements, television shows and popular personalities become the reference point for new linguistic expressions such as, Not Happy Jan!  These sayings may then become part of everyday communication in conversation, emails and chat rooms; however, their semiotic value is heavily weighted both by their continuing relevance and popularity.  In this way they stand as examples of language as cultural deictic.  A sociocultural perspective on linguistic analysis has been adopted to investigate the construction of linguistic ways of belonging in a specific cultural context.  It is what Fairclough names, "a systematic way of relating changing discourse practices to wider processes of social and cultural change" (Fairclough, 1992, cited in Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, p. 174).