Language Log

Spotted by Jonathan Lighter on a recent trip to Iceland: "A big ad for 66°North fashions, prominently displayed at Keflavik Airport, telling passengers everywhere that

There are over [a] 100 words for snow in Icelandic.
Only one for what to wear."

This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the "marketing innovations agency" Ignited:

Integrated Copywriter/Etymologist
Sure, the Eskimos have 40 words for “snow,” but Ignited has 40 words for “next.” That’s because we’re kind of obsessed with what’s next, whether that be in technology or media or Eskimo etymology. If you’ve got that same kind of curiosity and you fit the bill of skills below, you may be the next person we think of when we hear the words “Integrated Copywriter.”

Actual etymologists need not apply.

(See links here and here for more on the much-abused "Eskimo words for snow" trope. Hat tip, Nancy Friedman.)

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log:

All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants". Examples of a typical snowclone are: grey is the new black, comedy is the new rock'n'roll, Barnsley is the new Naples, and so on.

Xgate as a snowclone? Not quite. I see the conceptual similarity, but the very words he quotes show that I originally defined the concept (in this post) as a phrase or sentence template. The Xgate frame is a lexical word-formation analog of it, an extension of the concept from syntax into derivational morphology.

Jens Fiederer writes with a link to this blog posting, about North Korean ideologies as described in B.R. Myers's How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. The blogger adds:

I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick.  Excerpt:

North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.

Fans of Conan O'Brien, who announced he wouldn't accept NBC's plan to move "The Tonight Show" to midnight, have flooded Twitter with the #TeamConan hashtag. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I trace the evolution of the "Team X" meme (what Arnold Zwicky would call a snowclonelet composite) — from Team Xerox to Team Aniston to Team Edward. An excerpt:

"Team X" didn't cross over into pop-cultural usage until the summer of 2005, when Brad Pitt began appearing in public with Angelina Jolie, soon after his divorce from Jennifer Aniston. Ah, the mid-aughts, when the "Brangelina" portmanteau was inescapable. This celebrity coupling generated huge amounts of fodder for the tabloids and the budding blogosphere. On June 14, 2005, the New York Daily News reported that T-shirts reading "Team Aniston" or "Team Jolie" were all the rage in Los Angeles. There was even a three-month waiting list for the shirts (with Team Aniston "overwhelmingly" outselling Team Jolie, according to manufacturer White Trash Charms).

Read the rest here. (And compare the similar snowclonelet "X Nation," discussed a few years ago on the American Dialect Society mailing list here and here.)

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 remain a fertile source for the more clichéd strain of snowclones.

Sports journalism might be particularly prone to such hackneyed phrase-making. Case in point: in his most recent Monday Morning Quarterback column for Sports Illustrated, Peter King wrote that Carolina Panthers receiver Steve Smith "leads the NFL in guts." The sports blog Deadspin had already been tracking King's "funny little tic of expressing abundance by saying something like, '[Person or Team X] leads the league in [Intangible Category Y].'" Deadspin's Tommy Craggs then laid out the damning evidence of King's endless snowcloning.

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 similar formation "the Rolls-Royce of X"). Around these parts, this is of course known as a snowclone, but space did not permit a discussion of the expression's snowclonosity (beyond referring to it as a "sturdy phrasal template").

Stephen Colbert on Olympia Snowe (Colbert Report, Oct. 14):

We are now one step closer to a nightmare future where everyone has health insurance. And I will tell you who I blame: Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who voted in favor of the bill. And folks, I am angrier than an Eskimo… because I have 300 words for Snowe, and I can't say one of them on TV.

(Hat tip: Greg Howard.) The title for this post is lifted from the Twitter feed of Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig):

Susan Collins, R-Maine has hinted at a 'yes' vote. and only linguabloggers have "snowe-clone" in their repertoire of bad puns.

In response to my (admittedly feeble) garden-path post a couple of days ago, Tim Leonard writes:

Ha!  That's not a garden-path sentence.  This is a garden path sentence:

"Police in Washington state captured a schizophrenic killer who had escaped during an outing from the mental hospital where he had been committed to a state fair."

Source: Dean Schabner, "Escaped Insane Killer Captured After Four-Day Manhunt", ABC News, 9/20/2009.

From Ryan Pagelow's cartoon Pressed:

Correspondent Rory Finn, originally a foreign correspondent (before the paper shut the foreign desks down), now gets shunted from one desk to another.

(Hat tip to JC Dill.)

The lines between different sorts of formulaic expressions are often hard to draw: idiom, snowclone, cliché, catchphrase, or what? Yesterday I posted on my blog about a case that combines features of snowclones and idioms: the formula THE WHOLE X 'the whole matter, everything to do with the matter', the most famous exemplar of which is the whole nine yards, as in:

We had a blowout celebration: champagne, ice sculptures, the whole nine yards.

Continuing today's snowclone theme… For snowclone collector Mark Peters, the phrasal template "X is the Y of Z" is the gift that just keeps on giving. We noted in December that Mark had launched a blog entirely devoted to the snowclone, aptly titled "The Rosa Parks of Blogs." Since then, Mark has enterprisingly spun off the blog into a regular weekly feature for JamsBio Magazine. In each installment, the Y in "X is the Y of Z" stands for the name of a prominent artist from the world of popular music.

Here's a sampling:

• The Keith Richards of the cat world
• The Barry White of the apocalypse
• The Spice Girls of the ancient world
• The Britney Spears of the planets
• The Ozzy Osbourne of the banking world
• The Courtney Love of yards
• The Chuck Berry of nationalism
• The Johnny Cash of Communism
• The Johnny Rotten of Chinatown food courts

Snowclone mavens often have trouble deciding whether some pattern is sufficiently fixed to count as a snowclone, or whether it's just an option the syntax of the language makes available. I don't think there's an easy answer.

Case in point: X REQUIRES ALL THE Y OF A Z. As in this quotation from Gail Collins in the NYT of 2 April, p. A27:

He is the longtime minority leader of the [New York] State Assembly, a job that requires all the quick-thinking and decision-making capacity of a fishing warden in the Gobi Desert.

(That is, Z requires no real Y, so X requires no significant Y, either: being a fishing warden in the Gobi Desert requires no real quick-thinking or decision-making capacity, so being minority leader of the Assembly doesn't either.)

With a little ingenuity, you can google up more examples (and others with verbs similar to require, like take or demand). But the question is: do such examples get their effect straightforwardly from the syntax of English (admittedly, with figurative language plugged in), or is there some short-circuiting from a complex figure to a conveyed meaning?

I just don't know, and I don't think there's any easy way to decide in particular instances, short of finding some way to get inside people's heads. The best we can do is flag some possible cases for investigation — while being open to the possibility that the status of the expression is different for different people. After all, even X IS THE NEW Y (now so omnipresent that I stopped collecting instances of it long ago) started as a fresh figure, a genuine invention.