An avalanchlet of snowclones
moresnowclones
Now that we've revisited the wonderful world of snowclones (
here,
here,
and
here),
they seem to be everywhere. Here are three more that have
recently come to my attention:
the
N
that is N (
the abomination that is Jar Jar Binks),
from Aaron Dinkin in e-mail (19 May);
one
man's X
is another man's
Y (
one man's terrorist is another
man's freedom fighter), from Rachel Shuttlesworth on the
American Dialect Society
mailing list (20 May); and
color me
X (
color me surprised), which
I was reminded of this morning when I ran across references to Color Me
Arnold (a coloring book of sorts, aimed at Arnold Schwarzenegger, the
Governator of my state).
But first, three comments.
First comment: the line between clichés, some of which can
have open slots (
the wonderful world
of X, as in
the wonderful
world of snowclones above), and the somewhat more complex
classic snowclones, like
the
X
have N
words for Y (which gave the genus
its name), is not at all clear. Probably it's like the line
between idioms and constructions: there are pretty clear examples at
the extremes (the idiom
by and large,
the construction Subject Auxiliary Inversion), but a range of
intermediate types, with varying degrees and kinds of freedom as to
what can fill the slots in the pattern and with varying degrees of
semantic and pragmatic specialization.
As for
the wonderful world of
X, besides the very familiar X =
Disney,
Google's 600,000 raw web hits for "the wonderful world of" include, in
no particular order, the following fillers for X:
border collies,
insects, trees, Linux 2.2, Linux 2.6, the manatee, Calli And Graphy,
renewal energy, coins, Paso Fino horses, weather, animation, Larry
Carlson, poodles, wine, Narnia. There's one open slot, and the
expressions are semantically and pragmatically transparent. It's
just that
wonderful and
world collocate much more often
than the other (non-alliterative) possibilities: 63,900 hits for
amazing world (roughly one-tenth of
the
wonderful world count),
3,480 for
marvelous world,
1,140 for
astounding world,
and a mere 617 for
wonderful universe.
Contrast this simple collocational pattern with Geoff Pullum's
characterization
of the snowclone as "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable,
time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in
an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists
and writers."
Second comment: an update on the
once
a X,
always a X
snowclone. Roger Depledge writes (on 17 May) to point out that
the legal Latin formula
semel
X,
semper X 'once a X, always
a X' works semantically as well as phonologically, since
semel and
semper share an element
sem- 'one, together' that goes back
to PIE. In any case, it seems likely that the fixed version of
the English snowclone was strongly influenced by the Latin
formula. Depledge points out that the formula also occurs in
French (X
un jour, X
toujours) and German (
einmal X,
immer X). (For all I know, it
might occur in Finnish, Hungarian, and Russian as well.) Whether
different languages were separately influenced by the Latin formula, or
whether the formula spread from one modern language to others, or both,
is for textual scholars to discover. I am
so not a textual scholar.
Third comment: Barry Popik (ADS-L, 18 May) adds an entry to the X
is the new Y inventory:
Chocolate is the new black (which
he first observed at a Godiva chocolate store). It's not entirely
clear to me from the links that Popik supplies, but I think that the
intention is to convey that chocolate is an affordable luxury, like the
famous little black dress. In any case, X
is the new Y was one of the first
snowclones to come to our attention here at Language Log Plaza, back
when the furniture was still being installed in our gleaming office
tower.
And now on to the new entries. First,
the X
that is Y, where X is a descriptive
noun (with strong evaluative content) and Y refers to the thing or
person (usually person) that is being described. Dinkin's geeky
examples, gleaned from fanblogs (Dinkin notes defensively, "Not that I
ever read fanblogs or anything like that. This is purely for research
purposes, of course."):
the abomination that is Jar Jar Binks
the greatness that is Yoda
the manliness that is Jayne
the weirdness that is Xander
the gorgeousness that is Viggo Mortensen
the beauty that is Dominic Monaghan
the enigma that is Snape
the failure that is Enterprise
the wretchedness that is Matrix: Reloaded
the miracle that is George Lucas's imagination
(Please remember that Dinkin and I are merely reporting these
evaluations, not agreeing with them. I myself am, like the writer of
the above, partial to Viggo Mortensen, but find Xander charming rather
than weird and could describe George Lucas's imagination as a miracle
only in a sarcastic moment.)
Dinkin observes that's essentially impossible to do a Google search for
this snowclone, since "the * that is *" turns up millions of false
positives. He found the ones above by trying various instances of
Y that were likely to elicit strong feelings from geeks.
Undoubtedly the formula occurs in non-geek contexts; Dinkin just
happened to have noticed examples in fanblogs.
Goodness knows how you'd track down the origins of something like this.
On to the second example,
one man's
X
is another man's Y, for
which we have a pretty good idea of the source, namely
one man's meat is another man's poison.
Rachel Shuttlesworth found examples in exactly this form (well, with
variant spelling: "one man's meate is another man's poyson") from 1618
(where it was already referred to as "a proverb"). The OED Online
(March 2005 draft revision) has a slightly earlier version, from ca.
1576: "þat which iz on bodies meat iz an oþerz
poizon." The OED also has a 1604 cite that refers to "That ould
moth-eaten Prouerbe..One mans meate, is another mans poyzon."
Moth-eaten already, four hundred years ago! Variant formulations
(including the reversed "One man's poison, another man's meat", from
1902) appear throughout the centuries, but the archetype is clear.
The ultimate source again appears to be Latin. Lucretius,
De Rerum Natura, in fact. The
closest dictionary of quotations (a
Bartlett's
15th edition, of 1980) gives, from book IV, line 637 in the Rouse
translation, "What is food to one, is to others bitter poison."
In the original: "Ut quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum."
In any case, the fixed
meat...
poison version has been robust
for centuries, and now (as Shuttlesworth observed) serves as the model
for all sorts of variations, including the one in the Paul Simon song
"One man's ceiling is another man's floor". Among Google's
120,000 raw web hits for "one man's * is another man's *" are the
following pairings:
weed... ground
cover, coconut... grenade, junk... treasure, security... prison, pork
[in the legislative sense]
... dinner,
home... castle, vice... virtue, trash... treasure, data... metadata,
meat... girlfriend (sigh),
mistake...
smart move. There are other variants out there;
Shuttlesworth unearthed the following 1853 quote from the New York
Daily Times, that refers to the
"old, musty, but true proverb" and then plays with it: "What was one
man's loss was another, yes, a thousand ladies' gain.
At this point, the ADS-L discussion turned to the question of which wag
first varied the formula to the punning "One man's Mede is another
man's Persian". Definitive results not yet in.
Finally, the third example,
color me
X 'I am X'. Googling for this one requires sorting through names
of coloring books and straightforward instructions to "color me
green/black/etc." But there's plenty of gold left, with X =
surprised, impressed, jealous, sensitive,
beautiful, confused, underwhelmed,... There are plenty of
song titles, too:
Color Me X,
with X =
Badd (Young, Gifted
& Badd),
Blind (Extreme),
Gone (Rhonda Hampton),
Impressed (The Replacements), for
example. And, of course, the Streisand song, and album,
Color Me Barbra (1966).
There are plenty of examples with other object pronouns:
color her angry, color him
[designer Tibor Kalman]
a provacateur, color them [Nokia]
booming, color them confident.
No doubt plenty of non-pronominal examples can be found as well.
The ultimate source is surely instructions in coloring books, involving
a stretch from things like "color the pig pink" to things like "color
me happy". At some point, the expression became fashionable (and
therefore annoying), but I'm not quite sure what the precipitating
events were. I have a haunting feeling that La Streisand was not
the origin, that there was a song, or book, from the '50s. If so,
I'm sure some student of popular culture will let me know, in e-mail
beginning "How could you possibly have forgotten...?" I will be
appropriately humble, and thankful.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 21, 2005 02:01 PM