Snowclone

By Miranda

Do you know what a 'snowclone' is? Snowclones are phrases or clauses, familiar through literature, speech and, increasingly, advertising and the media, from which you remove one key word and replace it with another. But, since the structure remains so recognisable, it still conveys a particular association. You'll certainly recognise the format. One often cited as an example, trotted out each season by the fashion industry, is 'X is the new black' - simply insert whatever colour is deemed essential for the next three months and there's your commentary for Spring. It goes further when you move out of the realm of colour and move to 'X is the new Y'. Then you can have such gems as 'Rock is the new Pop' or 'Fake is the new real'.

I've been looking around for older ones and found, of course, that Shakespeare is well represented, 'My kingdom for an X', 'An X by any other name' and the winner, from Hamlet, 'To X or not to X'.

Why 'snowclone', then? It, apparently, depends dangerously from the notion that Eskimos have lots of words for snow. Sadly they don't, but that hasn't stopped the idea of an avalanche of synonyms from spreading far enough for linguist Geoffrey K Pullum to name this practice with reference to his own example, 'If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z'. It's easy to send up a snowclone. I can remember (yes, probably in the good old days) seeing a MAD magazine spoof advertisement for 'Cadillac - the Rolls-Royce of cars'.

My favourite snowclone derives from a classic of Australian TV advertising for a product now doomed by this blogging technology. Nonetheless, it has been applied in contexts domestic, work and political ever since it was first broadcast in the year 2000.

'Not happy, X'