I am neither America nor a snowclone
It's been over a month since I
last
issued this edict. Here's the Halloween version:
Not
every reworking of an idiom, cliché, proverb, catchphrase, memorable
quotation, or title represents a snowclone. In fact, most such
reworkings are just playful allusions to the original.
I say this because Mark Liberman
reported
a reworking of the Colbert title
I
Am America (And So Can You!) as
She's Famous (And So Can You) and
labeled it a new snowclone, and then Geoff Pullum
followed
up with yet another variation on the Colbert theme,
Colbert for President, and you can too.
There's no snowclone here, and there probably never will be one -- just
people riffing on a notable syntactic peculiarity of the original, Verb
Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) in which the base form
be is omitted (for details, look
here).
As I've said several times in the past, clear snowclones are themselves
formulas, and the snowclone template itself contributes meaning to
instances of the snowclone. Here's
a summary
from my website (based on a Language Log
posting
from 2005):
[Snowclones] have two-part histories, a
first phase in which a fixed model gains currency, a second in which
variations are played on the model, sometimes leading to a second
fixing, a crystallization of these playful allusions into a snowclone.
... Sometimes, every part of the model that can be varied for effect
is:
Eye Guy: Queer Eyes for the Spanish
Guys, Straight guys for gay eyes, Homosapien eye for the Neanderthal
guy
Brokeback: Backdoor Mounting, Breakdance Mountain, Brokeback Mounties
In snowcloning, these variants become fixed as formulas with open slots
in them, and with a mostly calculable meaning: [e.g.] One man's X is
another man's Y. It's still possible to play creatively with the
expression, but most variants will fit the template.
So far we have two variants on the Colbert title (surely there will be
more), and they share almost nothing but the conjunctive form and the
odd VPE. It's hard to see how this thing could settle into a
formula with (a few) open slots in it, and even harder to imagine what
the semantic contribution of the formula would be. This looks
like another Eye Guy or Brokeback case, not like that warhorse of
Snowclonia, The New Y (X is the new Y).
As I've also said several times, playful allusions to formulaic expressions
are incredibly common. Here are a few more from various sources:
Teachers Sold Separately (Harper's, November 2006)
The Kids Are Far Right (ditto)
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (recent book)
(Some involve
imperfect
puns, some do not.) There's no point in trying to collect
these things, because new ones crop up every day; you'd soon end up
with tens or hundreds of thousands of them -- none of them formulas.
Now, there
ARE hard-to-decide cases, and I'll return to
some of them in a later posting. But there are also plenty of
clear cases, and at least for the moment it looks like variation on the
Colbert title is one of them: clearly not a snowclone.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 31, 2007 08:05 PM