Formulaic language | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category

New snowclone days

April 21, 2016

Things have been quiet on the snowclone front on the net for a while. The Snowclones Database has been in abeyance (since 1/28/13), and little has been posted on Language Log or here. But then came my recent posting on the snowclone Think Of The Xs, and a bit before that, the introduction of a snowclone discussion on ADS-L. Dan Goncharoff on 4/12/16:

Discussion of Clinton e-mails led Obama to say, “there’s classified, and then there’s classified. Has anyone ever traced this formation back into history?

Tracing snowclones back in history turns out to involve all the complexities of tracing the history of some word or fixed expression, plus a lot more. More on this later.

But back to There’s X And Then There’s X. The major item here is a posting to ADS-L by Larry Horn on 10/8/12:

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Posted in Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

think of the Xs

April 19, 2016

Start with my 3/31 posting “A kitten-killing God?”, where I looked at a slogan (and caption for an image), with the crucial part bold-faced:

Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Please think of the kittens.

A formulaic pattern Please think of the Xs (with minor variants: Think of the Xs!, Won’t someone (please) think of the Xs?, Won’t anyone think of the Xs? What about the Xs?) — some sort of snowclone, call it Think Of The Xs, exhorting the addressee to stop some activity, on the grounds that it does some damage to the Xs or sets a bad example for the Xs. Nancy’s comment on this posting of mine:

Not wank-related, but “Catmageddon,” the new anti-smoking ad campaign from Truth, makes the following equation: “SMOKING = NO CATS = NO CAT VIDEOS.” Think of the cats!

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Posted in Formulaic language, Libfixes, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

Reciting formulas

April 13, 2016

The 3/13 One Big Happy, recently in my cartoon feed:

Ruthie and Joe are both mishearing parts of the Lord’s Prayer (in one of its many variants). Ruthie, line 1: “Our Father, who art in heaven”. Joe, line 2: “Hallowed be His name”. This is a highly formulaic text, in a strange variety of English, most often heard recited by groups of people mumbling out of synch with one other. The text is odd, and hard to make out: a perfect breeding place for mishearings.

About as good as texts sung to music. Songs often have remarkable words — poetic, allusive, dialectal, archaic, idiosyncratic, whatever — and singing itself and musical accompaniment deform and conceal wording. Hence classic mondegreens. Rote recitation of texts nurtures something very similar to mondegreens (often classed with them).

Posted in Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings | 2 Comments »

Tastee days

April 7, 2016

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

From the annals of snowclones, commercial icons in contestation, commercial names, and advertising run amok.

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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Snowclones, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

At the noodle bar

February 7, 2016

The Saturday (February 6th) Rhymes With Orange:

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Ah, a noodle bar — one in which the customer picks a type of pasta and a type of sauce. There are in fact such places, though they seem not to be called noodle bars.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

Five from Barsotti

January 20, 2016

It started with a cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti (from 1/18/10) in my doctor’s examining room yesterday:

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Angry doctor upbraids a smugly smiling patient (hugely obese, cocktail in hand, cigar in mouth).

Barsotti is a great favorite of mine, and he has his own Page on this blog.

So: four more Barsottis that tickle me and haven’t been blogged on here before.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Quotations, Snowclones | 1 Comment »

Viking Kids

January 18, 2016

Posted on Facebook yesterday, this entertaining composition:

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The caption combines two kinds of word play on the original It takes a village to raise a child: a word exchange, of village and child; and a pun on raise / raze. And it alludes to the reputation of the Vikings as ravaging and pillaging as they move across the countryside.

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Posted in Captions, Linguistics in the comics, Proverbs, Puns, Quotations, Semantics, Slogans, Word exchanges | Leave a Comment »

Snowclone to the rescue

January 17, 2016

Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm, in which Mother Goose deploys a snowclone strategically and Grimm gives her a SNAP for her performance:

One of the great (and most frequent) snowclones of all time, The New Y (in full: X Is The New Y).

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

The New Year’s resolution

January 6, 2016

Two days ago I posted a Mother Goose and Grimm strip on New Year’s resolution (#1 there, with the character Ralph confusing resolution and revolution). Now comes a Eugene Chan cartoon with a musical pun on resolution:

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