... but the Tensor's Snowclonatron will find it for you anyway. Over at Tenser, said the Tensor, the Tensor has just released a perl script that tabulates instances of snowclones. So I downloaded his program snowclone.pl, and executed
snowclone.pl 'X does not a Y make' >DoesNotA
and hey presto (well, after a couple of minutes), I had a list of 640 variant instantiations, sorted according to Google count. In this case, the top ten (with their counts) are
one game does not a season make 916
one election does not a democracy make 482
prancing about with jack mcconnells pants on your head does not a news story make 404
a bottle of water does not a rider make 402
benchmarks does not a majority make 195
one month does not a trend make 158
an os does not a platform make 143
one year does not a trend make 141
one win does not a season make 131
one day does not a trend make 85
The business about Jack McConnell's pants is a self-refuting line from a much-copied recent news story: Murdo MacLeod and Eddie Barnes, "McConnell under pressure over Bute House video fiasco", The Scotsman, 11/5/2006. Well, actually, it's from a reader's comment on the news story, so it's not so much self-refuting as reader-refuted.
The Tensor's algorithm for finding the boundaries of the phrasal template in particular cases is simple but generally effective. There's just one mistake in the top ten list: the phrase "benchmarks does not a majority make" omits an initial "several" in quotation marks in the source.
In this list, the Xs such that X "does not a trend make", in frequency-sorted order, are one month, one year, one day, one data point, one quarter, one week, one number, two months, one point, three weeks, one person, one season, one example, five people, one quarter, four days, an exception, one movie and one failure.
The Xs such that X "does not a democracy make" are one election, back room politics, voting, one poll, voting alone, a single election no matter how successful, majority rule, holding elections alone, the right to vote alone, and white boys in power.
The Xs such that X "does not a season make" are one game, one win, one bad loss, and April.
Posted by Mark Liberman at November 12, 2006 10:02 PM