David Craig writes: I saw a post on Facebook declaring Chanticleer to be the Navy SEALs of music and got to wondering how far this snowclone had taken off. A quick googling on "the navy seals of" and, in the first ten hits three were undeniable snowclones where "the Navy SEALs of X" had X […]
The granddaddy of all snowclones has often been expressed here at Language Log Plaza as a formula with variables: If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z. So it's pleasing to see this iteration of the ur-snowclone, from Jeff Potter's new book, Cooking for Geeks (p. 258): If Eskimos […]
Snowclones, in Geoff Pullum's early formulation, were defined as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." Of course, the field of snowclonology has moved beyond "lazy journalists" to a consideration of phrasal templates used by the broader populace, in varieties exhibiting a wide range of creativity. But journalists who have many column inches to fill […]
In Sunday's "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine, I use the recent discussion in Congress about "Cadillac health plans" as a news hook to consider the transferred usage of Cadillac in general. Most prominent is the phrase "the Cadillac of X" to refer to "the highest quality of (something)" (predated by the […]
Donald Trump supporter Sean O'Loughlin sent out a pro-Trump press release ("Dear America") with this bizarre passage: When people on the news call Donald Trump a racist, I find that statement difficult to believe. Like myself, Donald Trump is a life-long New Yorker. Donald Trump lives, works, eats and employs people of all races and […]
The city of Seoul, South Korea, has a new slogan. This is what it looks like:
William Lashner, Fatal Flaw, 2009: What are we looking at when we are looking at love? Eskimos have like six billion different words for snow because they understand snow. Don’t ever try to snow an Eskimo. But for six billion different permutations of emotional attachment we have just one word. Why? Because we don’t have […]
About seven years ago, in March 2006, I wrote a Language Log post about "the Cupertino effect," a term to describe spellchecker-aided "miscorrections" that might turn, say, Pakistan's Muttahida Quami Movement into the Muttonhead Quail Movement. It owes its name to European Union translators who had noticed the word cooperation getting replaced with Cupertino by a spellchecker that […]
This post hits a trifecta of LLOG themes: the troublesome interaction of multiple negations with scalar predicates that we call "misnegation"; the flexible phrasal or conceptual templates we call "snowclones"; and the multiplication of careless variant quotations. It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the […]
One of the random things I happened to notice yesterday, in a list of people who passed away in 2011, was the name of Leonard Stern, co-creator of Mad Libs. (Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky marked the game's 50th anniversary here on Language Log.) For those who've never seen it, Mad Libs is a word […]
Winter has definitely come to Scotland. It is cold, and when light first returns to the sky around 9 a.m. I can see snow on the cars outside my apartment that have driven in from out of town. The winter silly season in the UK newspapers has begun. Here is Charles Nevin in a putatively […]
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Last month, in the post "'Words for snow' watch," I reported that Kate Bush's new album (out Nov. 21) is called 50 Words for Snow. I wrote, "It's unclear at this point exactly how Eskimos will figure into Bush's songwriting, but it's safe to say they'll be in there somewhere." Today, thanks to NPR's stream […]
It's been a while since we've rounded up public appearances of the old "Eskimo words for snow" myth. Here are a few recent examples that have been sent in to Language Log Plaza. Item #1: The singer-songwriter Kate Bush will be releasing a new album on Nov. 21 with the title (sigh) 50 Words for […]