Snowclones are the new eggcorns.
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 … Continue reading →
X0 is “cholera”, from the title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1985 book of that name. X is usually something with a society-crossing effect, like global warming, insurgency, affluenza, the apocalypse, and of course, these days, COVID-19 or corona, which has … Continue reading →
A site for “CountryX is the CountryY of Z” This site maps puts tweets of the snowclone of the form “CountryX is the CountryY of Z” on a world map, in real time or something close to it.
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 … Continue reading →
The power of “I [heart] X” is now such that the transitive verb “to heart” (spelled out, or written as “♥”) has become part of the Oxford English Dictionary. I’m not a lexicographer, but that seems like a quick turnaround. … Continue reading →
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 … Continue reading →
X0 is turtles, as recorded in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 A Brief History of Time: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and … Continue reading →
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 … Continue reading →
This originates in the Internet memetic spread of a 2000 animation that cut together scenes from the Japanese video game Zero Wing in which a character says “all your base are belong to us” with various Photoshoppings of the same … Continue reading →
Ben Zimmer wrote this one up on Language Log a year ago. Here is my summary of that article. It originated in Luke 12:24 of the Bible, X0 being both “consider the crows” and “consider the lilies”. “Consider” is translated … Continue reading →