Iraqi reversal
The web comic Overcompensating
returns to
Snowclone World with an occurrence of a chiastic snowclone that originated with a Yakov
Smirnoff catchphrase:
The
last
time we looked at an Overcompensating snowclone, it was a variant
of the Eskimo N figure that gave snowclones their name. Now it's
a figure that Mark Liberman first
posted
about here on 1/29/04 in "In Soviet Russia, snowclones overuse you"
and that made it into the
snowclone
database on 5/22/07 under the heading "In Soviet Russia, X Ys you!"
(a.k.a. "Russian reversal").
The general form is "In P, X Ys you" or, even more generally, "In P, X
Ys Z", where P is a placename, Y a verb, and X and Z the subject and
object, respectively, of Y. We would normally expect "Z Ys X",
but instead we get the reversed "X Ys Z": "TV watches you" instead of
the expected "you watch TV" (in the Smirnoff original), "snowclones
overuse you" instead of the expected "you overuse snowclones" (in
Mark's title), "church and state separates you" (why singular
"separates"?) instead of "you separate church and state" (in the
cartoon).
In any case, we have Weedmaster P (who's something of a pothead)
deflecting Jeffrey's pun by responding with another type of play with
words -- but one that has no visible relevance in the context.
(Hat tip to Hannah Flaherty.)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 8, 2007 01:23 PM