As of today, I have at least 30 more snowclones queued up to be posted. I am holding off on taking suggestions until I get through them, although comments are open as you can see. I intend to post at least one snowclone a week until I get through my queue. All posts should be searchable, so if you do have a suggested addition to the database, please do a search before sending me a suggestion!
I am trying to make this comprehensive and consistently formatted, but as a blog getting it to that state is an organic process. You will see it get prettier as we go, I hope. I haven’t ironed out the formatting exactly, and I don’t always remember everything I want to say about a particular snowclone when I write its post, so I hope you can help me by commenting when you see information missing.
So, I’m confused. Don’t send suggestions, but if you do – search the site first? Anyway, assuming a favorable interpretation of the above, I have one to suggest:
“his X was his undoing”.
I guess, in this case X = insolence 🙂
I mean, if you have a snowclone, look for it here, and if you don’t see it, then send it over. But I think I should just let people make suggestions as they will, and I’ll deal with that as I go.
Thanks! I don’t think I’ve seen that one yet. Any ideas of its origin?
Two suggestions, if you’re willing to look at them:
Someone says “It was really hot [ or cold, or whatever] today. Response: “How hot was it?” “It was so hot that. . . [joke follows].” Trivial, but a regular routine on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson for many years, and people are still doing it. The point is in the tone adopted.
A recent one that has become annoyingly ubiquitous. The lead-in is something like: “It’s a fine thing to [have milk in your coffee. Lemon], not so much.” Of course, the “not so much” at the end is the snowclone.
My current most-hated phrase: [number] [nouns] to [verb] before you die. I don’t know where it’s come from but it still gets to me every time I see it. (I am based in the UK … perhaps it isn’t so endemic in the States?)
If you look up X in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of Y in the margin.
I haven’t heard this one much lately, but it used to be big (at least in my corner of the world) a couple of decades ago.
“X is not a crime” possible first appearance as “Poverty is not a crime”, now spread to bumper stickers as “Skateboarding is not a crime”.
How about “Xzilla”
X can be … well quite a few things (bride, bed, bud, cat, dog, hog, cow, moth, car, bike, cock, blob, …)
One I haven’t seen mentioned is “Friends don’t let friends do X”, or simply “Friends don’t let friends X” as X need not be a construction using the verb do. It originated, of course, in “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk”. A Google search yields 400k results, where X = use Windows, use camera phones, join Myspace…
Here’s a classic one I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
“X is the Yest Z on this side of the Mississippi”