It's not just to God's ear(s)
Kyle Hutchinson writes:
I read your Language Log
posting
about "From X's mouth to God's ear" and you had me pretty
thoroughly convinced that the phrase is not very snowclonish at all,
until a few moments later when I happened to read a post from
(writer/actor/Mac guy) John Hodgman's blog. In response to a email
hoping for an end to the screenwriters' strike,
he
writes, "FROM WALTER'S ELECTRONIC MOUTH to the writers' and
producers' ears."
So it's not just to God's ear(s); for some writers, there's now an open
Recipient slot as well as an open Source slot:
From X's mouth/lips to Y's
ear(s).
It's looking pretty snowclonish.
Hutchinson (who was of course primed by my posting to notice such
things) continues:
... a Google search on "from your lips
to the" (or similar truncated versions) makes it look like the entity
to whom the ears belong is a second open slot in the phrase. All the
alternates for the "God" slot do seem to be authority figures or at
least entities with decision-making power.
Here are a few of the ear-owning entities I came across:
the Hockey Gods
the Flying Spaghetti Monster [the deity of the Pastafarian religion --
AMZ]
the CIA
the Florida legislature
the publisher
TPTB [The Powers That Be -- AMZ]
my Muse
my editor
my seller
The X slot seems to be mostly second-person, but here's one like the
Hodgman example, with inventive items in both slots:
From [Paul] Krugman's lips to the
Flying Spaghetti Monster's ears... Hopefully, Mr. Krugman's words are
not just the ravings of a wild-eyed economist. (
link)