Snowclone

I stumbled upon the site the other day, when I was looking up the origins of the "Im not an X, but I play one on TV" snowclone.

Suddenly snowclone hunters were documenting media usages suggesting that, in space, no one can hear you belch, bitch, blog, speak, squeak or suck.

Regular readers learned there first about snowclones, the basic building blocks of cliches, like "X is the new Y" or "you don't need a degree in A to do B."

If so, you're being snowed under by snowclones — a category of fill-in-the-blank cliché identified by linguists.

When you read phrases like these in a newspaper, you've stumbled across a particular type of cliché: the snowclone.

The snowclone is mainstream enough now to appear in the title of a recently published book: This Is Your Brain on Joy.

This shifting to the less-formal contracted form is consistent with the reference to the film being a playful one, as snowclones in general so often are.

The concept of ‘snowclones’ has gained interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies of extravagance and expressiveness in language. However, no clear criteria for identifying snowclones have yet been established[.]