Category Archives: Snowclones

I am taking advantage of Mark Liberman’s legwork on this one today.

In Helen Reddy‘s 1972 song “I am Woman,” she says, “I am woman, hear me roar.”

X is still most often woman, calling up the feminist yell of the song, and the verb Y varies along roar‘s semantic spectrum, at least in the sense of noises you can make with your mouth: bitch and moan, despair, blubber, expound, meow, whine, moo, whimper, laugh, sing, scream, rhyme, sing torch & twang, purr. Y may also rhyme with roar but have little or no semantic relation: bore, snore, tour (well, in some dialects), soar, whore, pour, war.

Y does not seem to have restrictions limiting it to semantic or phonological similarity to the original, however. Shop, rock, walk, set off the airport security detector, kick ass, meme, campaign, run, ramble, click, stab, game, blend, draw, caulk, blog, and shoot also appear in this snowclone on the web.

When X varies, it seems to most often be a name, as we might expect with a statement that starts with “I am”: Peter, worm, GeekGirl, Justin Bonomo, Boobalicious, Kittenwar, protoplasm, Naturezilla, Superwoman, Catwoman, Hobbes, geek, blogger, Monki, Lizmonster, Hellionexciter, lion, mommy, milquetoast, Corolla, Gibbon.

I was aware of this snowclone before I knew it came from a song. I wonder if others who use it–particularly those who use it without any reference to being woman or roaring–are also not aware of the song. Snowclones seem to break free of their original referents to varying degrees; I’d be interested to see if there’s any pattern. It doesn’t seem to be only the passing of time that separates a snowclone’s usage from its origin. For example, everyone I’ve asked about “X and Y and Z, oh my!” knows it refers to The Wizard of Oz, even though the movie is almost 70 years old. This probably says as much about the ubiquity of this particular film as it does about the constraints or lack thereof on the snowclone. There’s probably a generational difference in people’s awareness of the origin of “I am X, hear me Y” just as there is with “X? We don’t need no stinking X!”

c. 1966-1969 [and later; this expression appears in several Star Trek shows and films], Dr. McCoy in Star Trek to the erstwhile Captain Kirk: “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a(n) {engineer, mechanic, bricklayer}!” This one is somewhat unique in that it started out as a snowclone, where Bones altered the Y as it fit the situation. I think the exclamation point is obligatory, to further separate X from Y: not only is McCoy not a bricklayer, it is absurd to consider him one. The exclamation point–or intonation mimicking the original, when spoken–is also necessary to evoke the original usage, rather than a simple comparison of two unlike things. X and Y should be semantically distinct from each other, but sometimes the difference between them is subtle for the sake of humor.

Other variations seen on the web:
“I’m an ingenieur, NOT a bloody locomotive driver!”
“I’m an architect, not a project manager!”
“I’m an accountant not a magician!“

The furthest this quote can be traced back is to the 1935 book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but the snowclone entered the wider world via 1974’s Blazing Saddles, which in turn is a reference to the 1948 Humphrey Bogart film (based on the book) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Badges show up in all three quotes:

1935:

Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges…

1948:

Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.

1974:

Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges.

In subsequent movie and TV references, X is most often “badges,” but usage elsewhere reveals a variety of plural and singular nouns in the X slot: login, cookies, recount, silos.

This snowclone is used when the writer wants to express contempt or mock contempt for someone asking for X.

Pronunciation of “stinking” also seems to be an important element of this snowclone. The original speaker being Mexican, and thus apparently a non-native speaker of English, was a salient piece of information to snowcloners, and again the relationship to the original quote is strengthened by use of that pronunciation. That or they equate his non-standard English with the casualness of conversation they want the snowclone to carry. So [as Arnold Zwicky noted in comments] steenkin, stinkin, and stinking are all possible variants.

[Edited to add quotes from all three sources, after David Craig provided a link to the original movie vector of the snowclone. Thanks, David!]

[Edit 2: I forgot to add the link for a much earlier and better discussion of this snowclone, at Subjunctivitis.]

1954 was the earliest attestation I could find, but it probably goes back further. The expression was popularized first by Bob Hope’s 1954 biography Have Tux, Will Travel and then by 1950s TV (and radio) show “Have Gun–Will Travel.” The title of Robert Heinlein’s 1958 Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was taken from the show.

Variations of X: music (seen on a shopfront in my hometown), laptop, children, fingers. I think singular nouns are more common than plural nouns in the X slot.

Thanks to commentator mollymooly for the earlier reference.

Origin unknown. Lately popularized by the country band Big & Rich’s 2004 “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)”. This is a popular one for bumper stickers and license plate frames. X is things a person can be said to ride, and Y is the canonical rider of X, so variations on this snowclone tend to sporting themes and sexual innuendo.

Other variations spotted in the wild: Save a wave, ride a surfer; save a sidewalk ride a skater; and my favorite from Harry Potter fandom: Save a broom, ride a Quidditch player.

The sporting theme can also be seen in [the as yet unposted-about] “Give blood, play X” snowclone.

[Edited to add: “Save an X, Y a Z” is also a possible variation, as Lance Fisher reminded me. The example he gives is “save a tree, eat a beaver,” and I’ve also seen “save a cow, eat a vegan.” I don’t think possible Ys are restricted only to {ride, eat}, though again there is a louche connotation in one of these examples, which seems to suggest that Y is limited to words that can stand in for sex.]

1979, the film Alien: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

As you might expect, Y is generally limited to things a person can emit, usually with his voice. E.g., pray, yawn, groan, sing in the shower. (All of these turn up on a Google search for "in space no one can hear you".) Y does occasionally appear with a non-vocal meaning, but I believe this is a violation of snowclone-hood, because the further it gets from having something in common with scream, the less likely it is to evoke the movie quote. I think in order for a phrase to be a true snowclone, it will remind the hearer of its original source.

X also seems to be somewhat limited. If it is not some variation on space (Mars, cyberspace) then Y is much more likely to be scream, so as to keep the Alien reference unambiguous.

This is one of the first instances of a snowclone written about by Geoff Pullum, before had even come up with the word “snowclone.”

Hat tip to commentator Jeremiah for pointing out the other variable.

You have probably seen some incarnation of this snowclone in the last week, if not more recently. (“Knitting is the new yoga“?)

Ben Zimmer has already traced the origin of this one: it was attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt as “pink is the navy blue of India,” but Diana Vreeland actually said it in the early 1960s. Thus we might describe the etymology as an instance of the “X is the Y of Z” snowclone growing into a new catchphrase. “X is the new Y” started to appear in fashion journalism in reference to the “navy blue of India” quote. In the late 1970s, various colors became “the new neutrals;” in the 1980s they were “the new black.” Today, Google gives 16 million+ webhits for "is the new". “As Gawker said, the thing looks unkillable.”

Edited 27 Mar 2008:

Nancy Friedman collected some recent citations from the San Francisco Chronicle for me:

“Happiness is the new black.” — Jon Carroll: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/27/DD9VVQAVO.DTL
“Obama is the new black.” — Nice twist! Quoted in Leah Garchik’s column: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2008/03/26/DDMKVPJT1.DTL
“Coffee is the new wine.” — Quoted in Leah Garchik’s column: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/27/DD7AVQ5LT.DTL

c. 1940s (?), as described in Geoffrey Pullum’s The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

This is the journalistic cliché that started it all — the granddaddy bleached conditional that inspired the name “snowclone.” A collection of examples has been collated from the web here.

Snowclones are not always simply “journalistic clichés,” as Mark points out in “Snowclones are the dark matter of journalism.” Sometimes they do indeed reflect a lack of thoughtfulness on the part of the writer, and sometimes we get a glimpse into “a little conceptual universe, bringing along with it a metaphorical framework that structures the surrounding chunk of discourse” when we see one, as in the case of “X is the dark matter of Z”:

If X is the dark matter of Y, then X is crucial to Y, is even the biggest part of Y, but it is not directly visible, and must be inferred because of the strong effects it has on visible things.

In the original citation, [Instapundit Glenn] Reynolds goes on to say that “I have a few readers who function as virtual stringers, sending me several links throughout the day. Professional journalists sometimes send me links to articles or topics they can’t get assigned to write about, in hopes that I might get the story more attention.” By prefacing this with the dark matter business, he’s positioning his own experiences with emailed leads as characteristic of a universal phenomenon, suggesting that weblog publication is the visible manifestation of underlying social networks that operate via hidden email connections. This is a pretty efficient use of five little words.

So any individual instance of a snowclone may or may not have both of these things going on. At minimum, “they’re … a reflection of just how wide the vocabulary of a fluent speaker of English (or whatever language they occur in) is, because they’re memorized chunks much like other lexical items or idioms” (as The Tensor reminded me), and sometimes they tell something about their user’s world knowledge, and the knowledge shared between the user and his listener/reader.

Originated with Yakov Smirnoff‘s “In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!”, which has also come to be known as the “Russian reversal.” X and Y are placed in such a way that if they were reversed, the statement would be perfectly mundane: thus, the Russian reversal of “you watch TV” is “TV watches you.” The cultural implication of this was negative, too, of course: Big Brother really could have been watching you by some means during the cold war.

This kind of reversal seems to be a slight variation on chiasmus: the “Soviet Russia” reversal does not necessarily require that the items being reversed be previously referred to in the same way, though it is usually implied. That is, “In Soviet Russia, t-shirt wears you!” is a plausible response to, “Hang on, I’m going to change my t-shirt.” So the wearing of the t-shirt is not explicitly stated, disallowing outright chiasmus, but the parallel elements from the first sentence in the exchange to the second are clear.

This snowclone seems to have been popularized via The Simpsons and web-geek culture.