Comments on: got X?

By: zortharg

zortharg — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:47:24 +0000

No way, that was the first? I’m sure I saw plenty of “got milk?” commercials before the guy trying to say “Aaron Burr”. Though the exact order I saw them in is a bit hazy. There was a whole series of such commercials; I remember one of them was a fake story explaining the invention of the name “Oreo” for the cookie, because some guy had just stuffed himself with them and tried to say “I don’t know” when someone asked him what they should call it. But if that the Aaron Burr one was the first, then I simply didn’t see it until long, long after it was first broadcast. That or I’m confusing the other ones with “milk: it does a body good” which was in the 80s and early 90s. And then I remember the Sat AM cartoon Project GeeKeR doing an inane reference to it – the title character, who was a shapeshifter, and was in the form of a dinosaur, and caught a girl who had just fallen from a great height, and there was an awkward pause, which ended when he said “got milk?” and she screamed in terror. They used a lot of snowclones in that cartoon. Like “An enemy is just a friend who’s trying to kill you” and “trapped like a cabbage in a cabbage trap!” Someone involved in this website might make a little category for it, it’s probably a goldmine.

By: Amelia

Amelia — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:52:44 +0000

In middle school, I remember a classmate who had a t-shirt from Joe’s Crab Shack that said, “Got crabs?”

Yeah, he was eventually banned from wearing it.

By: These are not the Snowclones you’re looking for … « Serendipitous Surfer

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:46:43 +0000

[...] got X? [...]

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:21:36 +0000

I think this snowclone is now often used in the opposite context, to indicate something no one needs or wants, e.g. “Got lice?” or “Got steroids?”

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:10:37 +0000

In other words, it’s typically a mass noun. Plurals seem to me (impressionistically) to be much rarer. As for “root”, it’s a special case meaning “super-user privileges”, and thus a hidden plural.