The Snowclones Database

This one has already been well-documented on Language Log and Wikipedia. For computer scientists, the X0 is “Go to statement”, per a 1968 letter to Communications of the ACM by Edsger Dijkstra, but this phrasing was actually journalistically well-known well before 1968, which is likely why it was chosen as the title of the 1968 letter. Since the phrasing is not particularly idiomatic, it arguably did not become a snowclone until the “Go to” variation became well-known. All the variants of X are really particular to computer science writing, more specifically to programming languages or shell commands because of this origin: cat -v, csh programming, global variable, recursive make, considered harmful (my favorite).

Snowclones are one of the memetic modes that cause misquotations to persist, so I found this The Atlantic article worth sharing today: “Beam Us Up, Mr Scott!: Why Misquotations Catch On.”

Among the ones I’ve written about so far, I discovered that “the only good X is a dead X” is a bit of a misquote, as is “we’re gonna need a bigger boat,” “these are not the droids you’re looking for,” and (arguably) “we don’t need no stinking X“.

It’s time some of the excellent submissions to the “I [shape] X” entry got their own post. The selections displayed here do not cover all the comments on that post, as some of the images have become elusive. Plays on the original heart make an appearance, in addition to symbols that don’t have a Unicode representation, like a food cart. There’s also one without any symbol at all, calling the reader to supply his or her own.

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:

If you read Language Log or the American Dialect Society mailing list, you have probably come across discussion of snowclones that narrows the definition in a way that I don’t do here.

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.