Snowclone

The linguistic phenomenon of "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants" was originally described by linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum in 2003. Pullum later described snowclones as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists". In an October 2003 post on Language Log, a collaborative blog by several linguistics professors, Pullum solicited ideas for what the then-unnamed phenomenon should be called. In response to the request, the word "snowclone" was coined by economics professor Glen Whitman on January 15, 2004, and Pullum endorsed it as a term of art the next day. Whitman derived the term from journalistic clichés referring to the number of Eskimo words for snow and incorporates a pun on the snow cone. The term "snowclone" has since been adopted by other linguists, journalists, and authors. Snowclones are related to both memes and clichés, according to the Los Angeles Timess David Sarno: "Snowclones are memechés, if you will: meme-ified clichés with the operative words removed, leaving spaces for you or the masses to Mad Lib their own versions." ==Notable examples==

Eskimo words for snow Pullum, in his first discussion of what would later be called a snowclone, offered the following example of a template describing multiple variations of a journalistic cliché he had encountered: "If Eskimos have words for snow, surely have words for ." The Arabic phrase originated from an Arab victory over the Sassanian Persians in 636 CE, described with the earliest known use of the phrase "mother of all battles" (). Although popularly used to mean "greatest" or "ultimate", the Arabic umm al- prefix creates a figurative phrase in which "mother" also suggests that the referent will give rise to many more of its kind. The template has been applied to other groups; the term "flying while Muslim" appeared post-9/11 to describe disproportionate suspicion shown towards airline passengers perceived to be from the Middle East. The use of variations of this template by job seekers goes back considerably earlier, dating to at least the 1920s, possibly around 1900, in The Times of London. Variants of the snowclone were used in the titles of the 1957 Western television show Have Gun – Will Travel, Robert A. Heinlein's 1958 novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Richard Berry's 1959 song "Have Love, Will Travel", The Three Stooges' 1959 film Have Rocket, Will Travel, Bo Diddley's 1960 album Have Guitar Will Travel, Megadeth's 1997 song "Have Cool, Will Travel", and Joe Perry's 2009 album Have Guitar, Will Travel. The Tao of X Beginning with Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics and Bruce Lee's The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, both published in 1975, there have been numerous sometimes serious but more often tongue in cheek examples of this snowclone. Examples include the 2000 romantic comedy The Tao of Steve and the 1982 philosophical treatise The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. considered harmful " considered harmful", an established journalistic cliché since at least the mid-20th century, generally appears in the titles of articles as "a way for an editor to alert readers that the writer is going to be expressing negative opinions about ." the template has expanded to numerous offerings in the field of information technology and beyond it, such as mobility as a service. ==Similar concepts==

In 1995, linguist David Crystal referred to this kind of trope as a "catch structure", citing as an example the phrase "to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before", as originally used in Douglas Adams's ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series (1978). The phrase references Star Trek'' ("... to boldly go where no man has gone before"), humorously highlighting the use of a split infinitive as an intentional violation of a disputed traditional rule of grammar. In the study of folklore, the related concept of a proverbial phrase has a long history of description and analysis. There are many kinds of such wordplay, as described in various studies of written and oral sources. Liberated suffixes Suffixes created from a shortened form of a word are sometimes called snowclones, but can also be described as libfixes, short for 'liberated suffix'. These are "lexical word-formation analog... [in] derivational morphology". Libfixes include formations like the English -gate suffix drawn from the Watergate scandal, or the Italian ', abstracted from the ' scandal. ==See also==