The article gives some overview of such interesting linguistic material as precedent texts, which are quite actively functioning in our everyday speech. The material for research and reflection is extracted from the speech corpus “One speaker’s day” (ORD), which is created at the faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University and is one of the most representative todae linguistic resources for the study of Russian oral discourse. The article offers different ways of analyzing this material: from the point of view of the society, which understands (or does not understand) these texts, taking into account the source language (Russian or foreign) and the source text (film, book, joke, poems, songs, etc.), the type of the modifications made with the text and the degree of its integrity/idiomatic, as well as fixing the method of its introduction into the oral speech and the reaction of both communicants -both speaking and listening.