Words for 'meh'

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The current strip over at Dinosaur Comics starts with these two panels:

And Ryan's note says

T-Rex's sentence in the first panel is a snowclone! There's a bunch of them here on Language Log, which is also just about where the word originated! NOW YOU KNOW



7 Comments

  1. Spell Me Jeff said,

    December 22, 2011 @ 3:08 pm

    Considering the number of times you've featured DC on this blog, it's really only fair, right?

  2. Ben Zimmer said,

    December 22, 2011 @ 5:49 pm

    Who knew the voice of God was actually the voice of Geoff Pullum? (Makes sense, actually.)

  3. alyxandr said,

    December 22, 2011 @ 7:12 pm

    For all that I love both, this sounds like an excellent invitation to expound upon the background of the term "logrolling"…

  4. Cy said,

    December 22, 2011 @ 7:41 pm

    @alyxandr there's not too much benefit to either party though.

    Despite dc being written by a trained linguist, and the acknowledgment in the mouse-over, if ll *didn't* post this, ll would be inundated with emails from the people who don't read both sites carefully or often enough to know everything is ok, along the lines of "OMG this comic said the eskimo thing!!!LOL!!"

  5. alyxandr said,

    December 22, 2011 @ 8:16 pm

    Good point, fair enough.

  6. Mark Mandel said,

    December 29, 2011 @ 12:12 am

    Did you know that linguists have 52 words for 'misuse of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'?

    My son, Jeremy, told me this meta-snowclone of his in the car today. I was LOL for about half a minute, though I did manage to stay in control of the vehicle.

    He says I'm the only one who's gotten it so far, except for his friend Liz, who is a translator and interested in linguistics.

  7. Moses said,

    December 29, 2011 @ 6:38 am

    Have you seen the new Volvo advertisement: The Swedes have 56 words for snow! Back to the original snowclone

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