From the Stanford Events Calendar for 5/20: at 7 p.m. on Wilbur Field:
(#1) The poster
The announcement:
Archive for the ‘Snowclones’ Category
The Stanford Dragfest
May 25, 2022Ruthian lexical items in real life
February 3, 2019In a private corner of Facebook today, this family exchange:
Child A was very busy.
Parent about A: He has an agenda
Child A: I’m not a gender
Parent: An agenda is when you have something you want to do
Child B: A gender is someone who serves food at baseball games
Parent: That’s a vendor
Child C *dies laughing*
And then from another parent:
My kid was so proud she tried cantaloupe at school. “The fruit, not the animal”
The Amelioration formula
October 5, 2017A recent instance, from Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre on Facebook today:
At the desk. Converting defective prose into the merely mediocre since 1980.
An earlier parallel, from Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) (co-written with Josef Breuer), as translated by Nicola Luckhurst (2004):
But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
A snowclonic figure of speech, Amelioration of Awful to Ordinary (Amelioration, for short), of the form:
Transformation-Verb Awful (in)to Ordinary
(with transformation verb transform, turn, change, convert, make, rework, etc.)
I like pig butts and I cannot lie
September 19, 2017Noted on a sign in Dan Gordon’s in Palo Alto yesterday — a place that specializes in barbequed meat, especially brisket and pulled pork. Meanwhile, I like pig butts and I cannot lie, with its double entendre play on butt, has apparently achieved meme status; it’s now available in many forms, including t-shirts from several suppliers:
(#1)
Playing an old lady
August 18, 2017Passed 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.
And venison is from Venus
December 19, 2016Marsupials are from Mars, according to Ruthie in One Big Happy:
Faced with marsupial, which looks like it has Mars as its first element (and sounds pretty close to that), Ruthie chops out the Mars and comes up with a second element upial. So she’s treating the whole word as a N + N compound, which means that upial is the head N, and if the compound is as simple as possible, it’s subsective: a marsupial is then a kind of upial — a variety from Mars.
Ruthie has then given marsupial the demi-eggcorn treatment, analyzing Mars in it and flying with the possibility that upial is an English noun (with a meaning she doesn’t happen to know).