Unblogged snowclones
On returning to the world of snowclones with my discussion of
The
New Y, I was dismayed to see how many figures or formulas had piled
up in my files of unblogged snowclones; the first came in in
2000! Here's the inventory, with my sources, and very minimal
commentary.
Note: some of these are without question snowclones, but others might
be patterns of playful allusions, idioms, playful morphology, or
clichés; several of them deserve a discussion of some length,
which I'm not now able to provide. Nor do I have the time now to
trace the histories beyond what I say below. This is the best I
can do at the moment.
1. "Now if you will excuse me I have a X to Y", e.g. "... I have
a plane to catch" (Aaron Dinkin, mail of 9/24/05)
2. "I'm from X and I'm here to help (you)", e.g. Ronald Reagan's
mockery of "I'm from the government and I'm here to help (you)" (Ben
Zimmer on ADS-L, 7/13/05, citing a query of the March before from Geoff
Nunberg)
3. "not the Xest Y in the Z", e.g. "not the sharpest tack in the
box" (me to Language Loggers, 8/30/06, with a response from Ben Zimmer
pointing to on-line lists of "what to call dumb people", for instance
this one)
4. "Don't X me because I'm Y", e.g. "Don't hate me because I'm
beautiful", from an 80's shampoo commercial that is possibly the source
for the snowcloning (mail from Tim Shock, 10/13/05)
5. "X-y McXerson", e.g. "Drinky McDrinkerson" for someone who
likes to drink a lot (mail from Don Porges, 10/13/05; playful
morphology)
6. "Hardly/Not a X goes by without Y", e.g. "Hardly a week goes
by without a Nunberg citing in the New York Times" (mail from Benita
Bendon Campbell, 10/13/05; possibly an idiom?)
7. "We don't need no stinking/stinkin'/steenkin' Xs", e.g.
"We don't need no steenkin' snowclones" (mail from Chad Sanders,
10/17/06; discussion on the
Subjunctivitis
blog, and a whole
web site
devoted to the figure and its history)
8. "If that's X, every Y should be so lucky", e.g. "If
that's being discriminated against, we all should be so lucky" (mail
from Marilyn Martin, 10/23/05)
9. "Yes, Virginia, [mildly improbable statement is true]",
e.g., "Yes, Virginia, the moon isn't made of green cheese" (mail from
Vishy Venugopalan, 10/26/05; the source of this one -- an 1897
editorial in the
New York Sun
-- is well known)
10. "X does not a Y make" and assorted variants, e.g. "One
chapter does not a dissertation make" (mail from Brendan McGuigan,
11/2/05; this one turns out to go all the way back to Aristotle, on
swallows and summers)
11. "X-lorn", e.g. "luck-lorn" (ADS-L posting by Ben Zimmer,
12/15/05; playful morphological extensions from "lovelorn")
12. "X gone wild", e.g. "Greco-Roman boys gone wild" as a
description of Fellini's
Satyricon (William
Salmon on ADS-L, 5/1/06, with follow-ups by me and Larry Horn; based on
the
Girls Gone Wild videos)
13. "Take X and shove/stick it", e.g. "Take this job and shove
it" (Doug Wilson discussion on ADS-L, 10/22/06, with examples going
back over fifty years)
14. "There's a lot we don't know about X", e.g. "There's a lot we
don't know about the unconscious" (Lee Rudolph on soc.motss, 1/22/04,
citing my use of the figure and suggesting that the original had
"mirrors")
15. "As a X, N is a great Y", e.g. "As a baseball player, he's a
great linebacker" (Mark Mandel on ADS-L, 8/22/00)
16. "busier than a X [someplace]", e.g. "busier than a one-armed
man in an ass-kicking contest" (Barry Popik on ADS-L, 5/1/04, citing
some "busier than a cranberry merchant" examples going back to the 19th
century)
17. "That's not an X;
this
is an X", e.g., "That's not a screw-up;
this is a screw-up" (Jason
Parker-Burlingham in conversation, 12/15/05)
18. "N is the M of X", e.g. "Eric Raymond is the Margaret Mead of
the Open Source movement" (e-mail from John Cowan, 9/13/05, and previously blogged
here)
19. "There's no rest for the X" and variants, e.g. "There's no
rest for the Clinton-obsessed" (me on ADS-L, 5/21/06; this goes back to
Isaiah and "no rest for the wicked", with later variants with "peace"
for "rest" and/or "weary" for "wicked")
20. "Whatever Vs your X", e.g. "Whatever bangs your shutters"
(many participants on ADS-L, 10/10-11/04)
21. "X me no Ys", as in "Petition me no petitions" from Fielding
(Mark Mandel on ADS-L, 8/22/01; David Crystal in his 2006
Words Words Words, pp. 70-1, takes
it back to Shakespeare)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 11, 2006 02:28 PM