Following on my twink posting, a bear comic:
This is a take-off on Bill Keane’s The Family Circus cartoon, adapted for gay men by reference to bears. (Plus a use of the X magnet snowclonelet.)
A gesture towards bear-twink equity.
(Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.)
In the world of male photography, there have been several specialists in young (especially boyish-looking) males, viewed homoerotically: Mel Roberts (here) and Bob Mizer, with posed but artless-seeming shots, and most especially Howard Roffman, who’s still flourishing at his craft. I think of Roffman as the twinkmeister, for his focus on the type of young man known in gay slang as twinks.
In the February 27th New Yorker, this Mick Stevens cartoon:
The snowclone X Is The New Y (The New Y for short) is the snowclone to bury all snowclones (some discussion here, though the material on it is now overwhelming). In Stevens’s cartoon we come to the end of the line: no more “75 is the new 65” or whatever.
(I can’t help noting that The New Y is the new Eskimo Snow, where Eskimo Snow is the ur-snowclone, about Eskimos and their putatively many words for snow. Not that Eskimo Snow is going gently away; Victor Steinbok has been sending me — and Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman — fresh examples or meta-examples every few days.)
Today’s Dinosaur Comics, in which Ryan North riffs on snowclones and Language Log (the all-caps speaker from above is God, or some equivalent authority, by the way):
Over on Language Log, Geoff Pullum has been fulminating over fresh citings of the Urschneeklon Eskimo N: on English gradations of social inadequacy, in “Eskimos again, this time seeing the invisible” (here), and on Japanese gradations and subtleties of sexual perversity, in “Octoporn” (here). And now, on ADS-L, in a discussion of bracketology, from a posting by “Otherwise” on the Scholars and Rogues site, about Rick Perry and George W. Bush:
To those of us not intimately familiar with Texas, Perry seems just like W. But I am told by my Texas friends they are very different. Eskimos have twenty words for snow. Texans must have twenty different types of asshole.
Only twenty? That’s a modest figure in the Eskimo Snow world.
From the web comic A Softer World (#737, 11/9/11):
In a comment:
(heartbreak is the real chlamydia)
This looks like a new snowclone-like figure X is the real Y, where X and Y denote things that are not normally compared, like emotions and diseases. (Contrast this with the ubiquitous snowclone X is the new Y, where X and Y denote things from the same semantic domain, like two colors or two ages.)
Recent portmanteaus that were intended to be clever: Ocularpation, male-odrama.
From a Lands’ End e-mail ad received on July 17:
Subject: Boldly go where no Paintbrush has gone before.
(showing brightly colored broadcloth dress shirts in the Paintbrush line). A play on the Star Trek tag
To boldly go where no man has gone before
(with variants having no one and no person), referring to the exploration of space.
Then it turns out that there are huge numbers of playful variations on the Star Trek line, using the formula
Boldly go where no X has gone before
(some with the infinitive marker to, some not), all conveying X moving into some new territory. So: snowclone-like, but at the edge of the snowcloniverse, along with other playful variations on well-known fixed expressions.
(A little bit about language, but mostly penguin stuff.)
From Michael Shaw in the New Yorker, 7/5/10, a cartoon illustrating that not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas:
Mark Liberman looked at the Happens In, Stays In snowclone in Language Log on 6/9/08, here. With a follow-up by Josh Millard on his own blog, here.
The penguins should have heeded this warning:
(Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.)
From the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. (2006):
It’ll (all) end in tears.
something that you say which means something will end badly and the people involved will be upset
She only met him in May and they were married by July. It’ll end in tears, you’ll see.
Really more of a saying or catchphrase than an idiom, but those are hard lines to draw.