Monthly Archives: April 2008

This snowclone was popularized by Tom Hanks’ diatribe in the 1992 film A League of Their Own:

Jimmy Dugan: Evelyn, could you come here for a second? Which team do you play for?
Evelyn Gardner: Well, I’m a Peach.
Jimmy Dugan: Well I was just wonderin’ why you would throw home when we got a two-run lead. You let the tying run get on second base and we lost the lead because of you. Start using your head. That’s the lump that’s three feet above your ass.
[Evelyn starts to cry]
Jimmy Dugan: Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying! THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!
Doris Murphy: Why don’t you give her a break, Jimmy…
Jimmy Dugan: Oh, you zip it, Doris! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pigshit. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game. And did I cry?
Evelyn Gardner: No, no, no.
Jimmy Dugan: Yeah! NO. And do you know why?
Evelyn Gardner: No…
Jimmy Dugan: Because there’s no crying in baseball. THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL! No crying!

(See the scene on YouTube.)

The “man’s world” metaphor implied by the original usage constrains what can occur in the X slot, at least popularly: it includes football, politics, the war room, poker, Survivor, jail, the boardroom, bodybuilding. (Non-manly variants are acceptable, just less common.) Emphasis following Hanks’ in the original quote is obligatory, and is usually minimally designated with an exclamation point.

A case can be made for a more general form of this snowclone, “there’s no Xing in Y!” Thus a defining characteristic of world Y is its lack of quality/behavior X: There’s no name-calling in debate! Instances of this form are more difficult to cite as snowclones: “there’s no touching the ball with your hands in soccer” would technically match the form, but is only a statement of the rules, not a reference to the indignity of ball-handling on the football field.

This phrase originated with Emma Lazarus’ 1883 poem that has come to represent the voice of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus“:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In the modern expression, give has become bring.

The huddled masses are still most common in this phrase, followed by criminal masses¹, hungry, and then there a few variations that don’t quite fit the “immigrant” frame set up by this quote: old sewing machines [pdf], dirty bombs. So it would seem that variation in this snowclone is not as wide as in some of the others I’ve covered–the X really is mostly limited to the set of things (people) that can at the same time be described as “poor” and “tired”. This list of descriptors may not be as tangentially related to each other as X, Y and Z sometimes are in “X and Y and and Z, oh my!”

¹ Two snowclones for one on that blog post (the other being “we don’t need no stinking X!”), though I don’t recommend you click it.