Not your mother's snowclone
In an entertaining piece on shelter magazines in the March 2006
Atlantic Monthly ( "Home Alone: The
dark heart of shelter-lit addiction"), Terry Castle reports (on p. 122)
that
If you enter the
words "not your mother's" on Google, you'll get nearly 200,000 results,
a huge number of which point you immediately toward shelter-mag
articles. "Not your mother's [whatever]" turns out to be an
established interiors trope, endlessly recycled in titles, pull quotes,
advertisements, photo captions, and the like. "Not Your Mother's
Tableware" is a typical heading--meant presumably to assure you that if
you acquire the featured cutlery you will also, metaphorically
speaking, be giving your mom the finger.
Castle is exploring the message of the shelter magazines that you can
free yourself from your mother's influence and make "your own
space". Along the way she has stumbled upon a snowclone that we
haven't discussed here: "not your R's X" (where R is a kin term)
conveying that this X is new, unprecedented, improved, superior,
unconventional, etc.
We haven't commented on Not Your R's X here, but at least once we've
used it: Mark Liberman, in a
brief
posting "Word Wars" (6/16/04) linking to a site on Scrabble
competitions, quoted "This is not your grandmother's scrabble."
Back on the mother front, Castle enumerates:
Other online items that are not your
mother's: wallpaper, mobile homes, Chinette, faucet sponges, slow
cookers, backyard orchards, and Tupperware parties. Beyond the
realm of interior decoration--it's nice to learn--you can also avoid
your mother's menopause, divorce, Internet, hysterectomy, book club,
Mormon music, hula dance, antibacterial soap, deviled eggs, and
national security. Thank you, Condi.
On 2/19/06, I got 256,000 raw Google webhits for "not your mother's"
and 70,000 for "not your grandmother's". Some of these
occurrences are literal, but an astonishing number of them are
snowclones.
Surely the most famous instance of Not Your R's X is the ill-fated "Not
Your Father's Oldsmobile" advertising campaign that General Motors
launched back in the 90s, a campaign that alienated older car buyers
and didn't attract enough younger ones. The Oldsmobile is no
more, but the snowclone thrives; "not your father's Oldsmobile" gets
9,190 hits!
In any case, "father's" beats out "mother's" on Google, 492,000 to
256,000, while "grandfather's" trails "grandmother's" by a bit (57,600
to 70,000). "Parents'" gets a respectable 79,000, and then the
numbers drop precipitously:
grandparents' - 818
brother's - 826
sister's - 609
uncle's - 481
aunt's - 176
For example: "not your brother's GameBoy" (referring to a Nokia
handheld), "not your sister's Nancy Drew" (referring to America's
CryptoKids, a National Security Agency website for children -- I am not
making this up), and "not your uncle's Lexus" (will they never learn?).
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 20, 2006 12:15 PM