Bad X, no Y.

It might also look better if punctuated differently (e.g., a colon or a dash in place of the comma).

My colleague thinks the original version might be “Bad cop, no donut.” This sounds plausible to me, although I could only recall it in the abstracted version myself.

The specific phrase “Bad cop, no donut” gets about 10K Google hits; my attempt at a more general search is too broad (my Google fu is insufficient to eliminate some clear excess, e.g., “Bad Credit? No Money Down”).

By the way, I’m sorely tempted to bind those variables with lambdas or some such: it worries me a little to see them roaming around free like that.

The particular instance that brought this to mind was “Bad department, no course release.” The administrator in question didn’t actually say that, but it struck me as the most concise way to describe (in part) the results of a recent meeting.

I predict that some day this will merge with a “No X for you!” snowclone, originating with Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, to yield a “Bad X, no Y for you!” variant.

(Full disclosure: I am not a linguist, but I play one in a Computer Science department.)

I found your site a while back. I was looking for samples of the structure “Show me an X, and I will show you an Y”, like in “Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser”. I thought of this site, but I couldn’t find any post on it. I think this info could be useful to you.

Thank you for your work.

Best regards,

Juan Pablo Martínez