Hat-tip to Ben Zimmer for bringing this to my attention.

♥ to heart

The new sense added to heart v. in this update may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers. It originated as a humorous reference to logos featuring a picture of a heart as a symbol for the verb love, like that of the famous ‘I ♥ NY’ tourism campaign. Our earliest quote for this use, from 1984, uses the verb in ‘I heart my dog’s head’, a jokey play on bumper stickers featuring a heart and a picture of the face of a particular breed of dog (expressing a person’s enthusiasm for, say, shih-tzus) which itself became a popular bumper sticker. From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’.

The entry:
heart, v.

trans. colloq. (orig. U.S.). To love; to be fond of.Originally with reference to logos using the symbol of a heart to denote the verb ‘love’: see quot. 1983.

[1983 Associated Press (Nexis) 16 Nov., From Berlin to the Urals, teen-agers wear T-shirts reading, ‘Elvis’, ‘Always Stoned’, and ‘I (heart) New York’.]
1984 About Helmet Visor Screws in net.cycle (Usenet newsgroup) 26 June, Joe ‘I heart my dogs [sic] head’ Weinstein.
1986 Daily Collegian (Pennsylvania State Univ.) 14 Feb. 2/3, I just want to say to my Bunny Boo I Heart you Kathleen.
1998 Houston Chron. 10 May (Chronilog section) 7/1, I think he’s so cute. I heart him to bits.
2003 Time Out N.Y. 7 Aug. 77/1 If you heart dance like DJ Scott does, then hie thee down to this little drink spot tonight.
2009 A. Ham et al. Middle East (Lonely Planet) (ed. 6) 141/1 We heart the brownies (E£4).
2010 Observer 18 July 13/4, I hearted Take That‥with a teary passion that was deemed unbecoming in a Jesus and Mary Chain fan.

I [food cart] street food:

I [raindrop] Seattle:

I [dice] Las Vegas:

I [space invader] Paris:

I [heart heart heart] polygamy:

I [?] Unicode:

I [glove] MJ:

I [ ] organ donation:

I [tomato] my farmer:

I [foot] Madlibs:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!

Whenever this story originally appeared, it does seem to have become popular as a result of Hawking’s retelling:

X must be something that can be pluralized: actors, cans, features, caches, big bangs, cronies, and fraudsters all occur in the variable position. It often seems that if a person suggests that it’s “caches all the way down“, he means that many things in a system may be called something else but ultimately can be modeled as caches. Whether we think of gravity and centrifugal force rather than the balancing of a giant turtle as what holds us on the earth, it doesn’t make much difference in most of our day-to-day actions. I’ve also often heard “it’s X all the way down” as the answer to “but then what? but then what?” type questions–at some point the last thing you understand in a sequence of events is what goes all the way down.

Arnold Zwicky refers [PDF] to this sort of usage as “playful allusion”, and phrases may be playful allusions on the way to becoming snowclones by the narrow definition.

The cliché templates known … as snowclones … have two-part histories, a first phase in which a fixed model gains currency, a second in which variations are played on the model, sometimes leading to a second fixing, a crystallization of these playful allusions into a snowclone.

In the first phase, an idea is expressed in various ways: “what one person likes, another person detests”, “things that please some people repel others”, etc. All of these are understood literally, require no special knowledge to understand, and can be created on the spot. Eventually, one particular formulation becomes conventional, in a cliché, striking quotation, proverb or saying, catchphrase, slogan, or memorable name or title: “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

I tend to overlook this distinction when documenting snowclones here, because I like playing with *all* the phrases, and I think from a lay standpoint the distinction is not always clear. I do want to call attention to this fact, however, and I encourage you to remind me that a phrase I document here may not be a snowclone by the narrow definition.

Because of the phrase’s idiomaticity, X may be singular or plural or otherwise not quite line up with the restrictions normally implied by “all your”. Variations include Trek (as in Star Trek), geolocation, [hard] drives, big data, candy, tax cuts. In 2006, the Tensor found with snowclone.pl that X other than “base” most frequently was blogs, audioscrobbler, snakes, bass, bias, skyscrapers, iraq, athens, and typos. I do not see a feature restriction on X like must-only-have-one-or-two-syllables, which makes it more flexible than other snowclones. In cliche years, it is very young, however, so it remains to be seen whether or how this snowclone will flourish.

It originated in Luke 12:24 of the Bible, X0 being both “consider the crows” and “consider the lilies”. “Consider” is translated from the Greek “observe fully”, so when using this snowclone, you’re instructing the reader to think carefully about X and compare some of its qualities to himself. X must be restricted to flora and fauna in order to evoke the original, and famous instances include daisies, cod, fish, termite, oyster, armadillo.

From Invincible Iron Man #28, Matt Fraction and Salvador LaRocca.

(Bonus “word for X” cliche action there too!)

The Google Ngram Viewer reveals “I think therefore I am” taking off in (non-periodical) print around 1900.

The snowcloneification was surely not far behind, since so many people would already have been familiar enough with this cliche of philosophy. Something else will very occasionally occur in place of “am” (“I knit, therefore I blog“), but this generally weakens the tie to the original–unless the composer of the snowclone is very clever.

X is often single-syllable verbs, no doubt to help evoke the original, but longer words are possible: smell, skate, rez, tweet, drink*, fink*, shrink*, consume.

* Note the rhyming with the original think.

Note that the original phrase was “…you do not talk about fight club”, emphasis mine. This shifting to the less-formal contracted form is consistent with the reference to the film being a playful one, as snowclones in general so often are.

Many of the Xs are also clubs, including fat club, AppleClub, film club, Lego club. Other Xs include robots, the metro, Usenet. One unusual X, the quilting society, turns out to be in the title of an Onion article. These snowclones often serve as headlines to stories about X, in which it is interesting that participants in X do not talk about it.