TNT Classic Snowclones: X Classic Y: N
dgraham.
Posted to Etcetera on Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 06:33:21 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Have you ever wondered where all those "TNT Classic X: Y" heds come from? Well, these guys would.
There have been several recent "advances" in the field of linguistics, recently, with regards to trends in popular speech. Of these eggcorns and snowclones are two of the more prominent.
An eggcorn is a (ill)logical formation of a word that you thought you heard right. Like hearing acorn as eggcorn, for example.
A snowclone is any kind of formulaic phrase where you can sub in any words of the appropriate type to make it fit. The NY Times describes them as "the building blocks of clichιs, like 'X is the new Y'".
Snowclones and eggcorns say a lot about language and modern culture. It's easy to make a joke by taking an old Simpsons quote and subbing in a few new words appropriate for the situation (I for one, welcome our new X overlords). it's just as easy to show off a cultural bias, like how the Innu must clearly know more about snow since they have, like, 2000 words for it, right? (Hence the name snowclone, as utterances appeared subbing out "innu" and "snow" for various other words.)
Do you suffer snowclone blindness or, can you share some of your favourite (or most hated) snowclones and eggcorns with us?
One of my favourite eggcorns is "ad homonym". I always chuckle a little when I see it.
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