The Snowclones Database

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.

The Snowclone(s)¹ Database was inspired primarily by Mark Liberman et al’s Language Log and Chris Weigl’s Eggcorn Database. If you are here, you probably already have some idea of what a snowclone is, but in case you’re not sure, here’s some quick review.

A snowclone is a particular kind of cliche, popularly originated by Geoff Pullum. The name comes from Dr. Pullum’s much-maligned “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z”. An easier example might be “X is the new Y.” The short definition of this neologism might be n. fill-in-the-blank headline. The phenomenon is real enough to have 90,000 Google hits as of this moment and a Wikipedia entry.

The definition of snowclone is somewhat fluid, by its nature, but there are some ground rules. I consider a high number of google hits with significant variation evidence for a phrase’s snowclonehood. Snowclones are a subset of cliches, but not all cliches are snowclones. (Depending how how strictly you define “cliche”, not all snowclones are cliches, either.) Your favorite Simpsons quote is not necessarily a snowclone.

I first discussed snowclones here.
¹ My usage varies freely, as far as I can tell, between “the snowclone database” and “the snowclones database”. Be welcome to use either.

“I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.”

From the episode “Deep Space Homer ” on the TV show, The Simpsons, 1994. (Originally broadcast Feb. 24, 1994.)

On The Simpsons Archive.

Introduced on Language Log here.

As far as I can tell, this snowclone originated with dialogue in The Wizard of Oz (1939): “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!“

The variables may be plural or singular, count or non-count:

filling and sanding and brickwork oh my!
comments and trackbacks and thumbnails oh my!
mugging and sugging and pugging oh my!
servals and binturongs and coatimundis oh my!
goblins and wizards and orcs oh my!
turtles and lizards and snakes oh my!
goblins and witches and halfwits oh my!
lions and tigers and misogynists oh my!
trojans and dialers and spies oh my!
night elves and taurens and gnomes oh my!
kiddies and kiddies and kiddies oh my!
ilyrians and romans and greeks oh my!
ninjas and ninjas and ninjas oh my!
lions and hyenas and pumbaa oh my!
ligers and tigons and pizzlies oh my!
turtles and rabbits and moles oh my!

To my ear, there is a stress limitation on the variables; that is, the stress pattern of the snowclone must match “LIons and TIgers and BEARS, oh MY!” The “hyenas” of “LIons and hyEnas and PUMbaa oh MY!” would then violate this constraint. To my eye, however, the constraint is much laxer, so I’d let it pass in writing. It does seem that for other people, “oh my!” is a strong enough this-is-a-snowclone signal to give them greater flexibility on the variables. “Cursors, and Text, and HTML…. Oh My!” is awkward no matter what, though. 😉

This snowclone was one of my [Erin’s] original inspirations for the Snowclones Database. I discussed it with some Livejournal friends here.

Please be advised: this entry is incomplete.
Origin unknown.

There are a couple of variations on this. In one, Y is really the short form of X, e.g., in “when I say ‘rare’ what I really mean is that it was thought to be extinct until 1994 when a hiker found a grove of about 100 of the plants in the middle of a one million acre wilderness area outside Sydney, Australia.” (link) In the other, Y is the opposite of X, or they contrast in meaning in some way. E.g., “when I say ‘today’, I mean ‘tomorrow’.” (link)