Monthly Archives: September 2007

Most people connect this with Dundee’s line in Crocodile Dundee (1986): “That’s not a knife; that’s a knife”, where he holds up a large bush knife to an attacker’s (mugger’s?) comparatively petite switchblade. Notice how we’ve changed the pronouns to be more contrastive, from “that” and “that” in the original to “that” and “this”. “This” brings the speaker and his X closer to the listener/reader. Even people intending to reference the movie directly remember it this way, perhaps because there’s something more natural about a that/this pairing in a contrastive statement than a that/that or this/this pairing.

Variants on X are many. My favorites in snowclone.pl’s top results include race, gun, helicopter, sandwich, hard drive, mullet, blog, and miniskirt. X is usually a tangible object: we want to be able to compare that X to this X and see that the latter is more impressive.

[Taken from the list at the “Unblogged Snowclones” on Language Log.]

The earliest citation is c. 1595, per David Crystal in Words Words Words. Wikiquote provides a relatively long list of instances of this one in literature. X may be a word that can act as both noun and verb, as in Fielding’s “Petition me no petitions,” but may also be just a noun, as in Tennyson’s “Diamond me no diamonds!” The structure is apparently a strong enough–and iambic enough–idiom to appear multiple times in Henry Fielding’s and William Shakespeare’s works. Modern usage seems fairly tongue-in-cheek. X appears as daunt and quiesce. Most often, modern variants on this snowclone are actually quoting the older variants. I might even say that this is no longer a snowclone by the “strong” definition of the word (i.e., significant modern variation on the structure) because of the lack of variants on X.

Arnold Zwicky lists this in his “Unblogged Snowclones” Language Log post as “X me no Ys,” but snowclone-y variants with two variables are much less common (and/or difficult to track down).

This seems have originated with this 1980s Pantene shampoo commercial: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” X variants from the web include superfly, childfree, nerdy, adorable. The idea in the original commercial was that you don’t need to envy someone for having quality X because you can attain X yourself. Modern variants often carry this meaning as well. Many instances are orthographic, phonetic, or morphological plays on the word beautiful itself: viewtiful, bootyful, bloggerful, indicating that most people are aware of the original referent when using this snowclone.

Some non-linguistic analysis of this commercial can be seen here, in the context of literature and metaphor, with “advertising as a form of religion.” I don’t want to stray too far from linguistic discussion to comment on this, but I would like to note that as a phrase becomes a cliche, as a snowclone is, its rhetorical strength can be bleached away. So while there may be moral undertones to the original advertisement, the modern snowclone is not necessarily advising readers to avoid the sin of envy, or judging the speaker for his X-ness.

[This snowclone was pulled from Arnold Zwicky’s list on the Unblogged Snowclones post at Language Log.]