On the fringes of snowclonia
Snowclones are language patterns with open slots which are in some sense
formulaic, but as we've noted over the years here on Language Log,
there are all sorts of language patterns like this: syntactic
constructions, idioms, clichés, catchphrases, riddle and joke
forms, poetic forms, and more. People also make playful allusions
to idioms, clichés, quotations, and titles, varying parts of the
models for effect. So there are all these things that aren't
snowclones, and some classic cases that are -- and some more cases on
the fringes. My snowclone omnibuses (
here
and
here)
are compendia of candidate (putative or potential) snowclones, things
that people have suggested to me might be snowclones, not things I'm
certifying are snowclones; each case has to be looked at on its
own. (Unfortunately, the putative cases pile up faster than I can
deal with them.) Today I'll look at some cases that have come to
my attention recently.
Call Your Office: I
argued
a while back that "the wonderful world of X" is just a cliché
with an open slot.
Now Ben Zimmer has
blogged
on "X, call your office", which I at first took to be something
similar. But Ben pointed out that the figure probably has its
source in a catchphrase ("Judge Crater, call your office", itself based
on earlier literal uses) -- which would make it an instance of the
playful allusion type rather than the cliché type -- and his
discussion suggested that the figure as a whole contributes some
meaning (in my terms, that X is absent from the scene but is relevant
to the matter at hand), though some of the occurrences might lack this
meaning and be mere playful allusions.
Unsafe In Any Child's Garden:
In earlier postings on candidates for snowclonehood, I argued several
times that the candidates were just playful allusions to fixed
expressions of one kind or another -- for example,
here
on "X-back mountain" (based on
Brokeback
Mountain) and
here
on "X eye for the Y guy" (based on
Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy). In both these cases, the
formulas contribute no meaning of their own, while the clearest
examples of snowclones ("X is the new Y", for instance) do.
Then back in August, Chris Phipps asked me about "unsafe P any X", as
in the title of
a
posting by Mark Liberman: "Journalists' questions: unsafe in any
mood?". This, I replied, was just a playful allusion to Ralph
Nader's
Unsafe at Any Speed,
and pretty much a one-shot deal at that: there's no significant
collection of variations on the title, a collection that would suggest
that there's a pattern available for general use here.
Similarly in my use of the title "A child's garden of languages" for
a
recent posting; the title takes off on Robert Louis Stevenson's
A Child's Garden of Verses.
Over the years I've posted several times about occasions on which all
sorts of language play are prominent (in
science
writing, in
teaser
headings on the covers of porn magazines). I intend to post
further on these "ludic locales", of which there are many, but my
current point is that among the types of language play to be found in
them are playful allusions, lots of them, and no one should want to
label most of these as snowclones, since virtually any idiom,
cliché, quotation, or title can serve as the basis for an
allusion. Many of them combine some other feature of language
play with the playful allusion, as in these two examples, where there's
some phonological play: "Ground Control to My Imam" (feature title in
Harper's, November 2006), alluding
to David Bowie's "Ground Control to Major Tom"; and "Take the Money and
Rue" (
NYT editorial, 9/12/07),
alluding to Woody Allen's
Take the
Money and Run.
Closer to Snowclone Central:
Closer in is "on a scale from one to X", as
discussed
here by Mark Liberman a little while ago. Mark, cautiously,
rated the figure as a 5 on a scale from one to snowclone, though others
might accord it a higher rating.
Meanwhile, I just noticed "from X's lips/mouth to God's ear" in
a
posting of Geoff Pullum's: "From [Stanley] Fish's mouth to God's
ear." Substantial number of hits, but it's not at all clear what
people are using the figure to convey: there are some occurrences of
"from your lips to God's ear" that seem to convey nothing more than
that God hears everything you say, but in most occurrences of the
figure something more complex is going on.
And over on ADS-L I recently started a discussion of "Who are you and
what have you done with X?", which I'd contemplated using in a
recent
posting that mentioned my granddaughter's alarm at being confronted
by her mother speaking German: "Who are you and what have you done with
my mother?" The figure is canonically used in situations where
the speaker is confronting someone who appears to be X but observes
that this person lacks some property or properties historically
characteristic of X; think
Invasion
of the Body Snatchers. Things are a bit tricky, though,
because there are perfectly straightforward uses of such expressions,
as sequences of ordinary questions. In any case, everybody seems
to think that the figure originated in a specific quotation (not in
IBS, so far as I can tell), but so
far no one has a good candidate. And there are lots of instances
out there.
zwicky at-sign csli period
stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 23, 2007 02:54 PM