Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Passed on by Benita Bendon Campbell, the One Big Happy for yesterday, as it appeared in the Denver Post:

The snowclone Play One, in which the central figure denies that she is an old lady — that’s not how she perceives herself — while conceding that she plays one in real life.

(The image is of a clipping from the paper, which is why it has its little defects. This strip won’t be available on-line for more than a month, when it will come to me in my daily GoComics feed.)

I’ve posted at least four times about the Play One snowclone, starting with a 10/12/05 Language Log posting “Playing one”, especially in the variants:

I’m not X, but/though I play one on TV.
I’m not X, I just play one on TV.

(in the Snowclone Database on 8/17/07).

The OBH strip has a wry variant of this, in which someone can play a role in real life as opposed to in a dramatic performance (as on tv).

This entry was posted on August 18, 2017 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.