Cultural references

Ann Burlingham has written me about the headline

Mau Mauing the Flesh Eaters

on Jennifer Schuessler’s review of Jonathan Safran Froer’s Eating Animals (in the November 15 New York Times Book Review). She just didn’t get it. But Wikipedia’s article on the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s had the crucial clue, all the way at the bottom: a reference to Tom Wolfe’s 1970 article “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (combined with another Wolfe article to make the 1971 book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers).

Cultural references are the very devil.

Engines that could(n’t)

Another playful allusion, this time from Dennis Baron in his excellent and thought-provoking new book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. From chapter 11  (“The Dark Side of the Web”), page 215, on Google in China:

Steering readers is exactly what search engines are suposed to do. It’s just that most searches aim to give users what they want, not hide it from them. Google’s Chinese adventure creates a search engine that couldn’t. Users who tried to access forbidden sites were greeted with this message: “Because of legal restrictions, your search cannot be completed.”

Note “the search engine that couldn’t”. This is an allusion to the moralistic children’s story The Little Engine That Could (Wikipedia page here), the little engine that succeeds (in pulling a train over a mountain) via the motto “I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can”. Baron’s characterization of Google in China as “the search engine that couldn’t” (succeed in finding things) is an ironic echo of the plucky engine in the story.

(Probably I should stop posting about playful allusions. There are just too many of them around.)

Someday, a Bill Will Pass

Speakers and writers use all sorts of stock items — words, idioms, clichés, proverbs, quotations, snowclones, common collocations, morphological patterns, syntactic constructions, and more — stuff “pulled off the shelf”. But they also play with this material, in many ways, all the time. As in the headline “Someday, a Bill Will Pass” on a Gail Collins op-ed piece about a bill to reform the student loan program, now being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives (in the NYT on September 17).

The head is a playful allusion to the song title  ”Someday, My Prince Will Come”, originally from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, since recorded in many different versions. (The title appears in several variants: with initial Someday or — an older spelling – Some Day, with or without a comma following that expression.)

What’s carried over from the song title is the template

(T) Someday, NP will V

Now, you can understand the headline (and other instances of (T)) perfectly well even if you don’t catch the echo of the song. But what the allusion to the song contributes is the emotion of wishful longing in the Snow White original.

(T) isn’t a snowclone, at least yet. It isn’t a conventionalized pattern conveying wishful longing; instead, hearers and readers have to work out this connotation for themselves. (Over the years I’ve posted on Language Log several times about distinguishing playful allusions from snowclones: here, here, here, and here, for instance.)

No doubt, connecting the headline to the song title is facilitated by their having the same prosody. “Someday, a Student Loan Reform Bill Will Be Passed in the House” really wouldn’t work as well.

Jokes and snowclones

Dinosaur Comics takes on a class of jokes insulting particular groups, and supplies some joke templates for them:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Some readers will identify these most strongly with the rich vein of “lawyer jokes” that put lawyers down (“What’s the difference between a lawyer and an X?” and the like).

Note that when PROFESSION MEMBER is expanded to take in members of social groups, then T-Rex finds the jokes no longer “all in fun” (“just jokes”, as some people say), but instead sees them as X-ist, in particular racist.

Erin O’Connor has picked up this cartoon on the Snowclone Database, in an entry for 7/20/09, where she connects the joke templates to snowclones. Granted, they are both types of formulaic language (as are riddle templates, poetic forms, and much else), but I see them as significantly different. Templatic jokes and riddles (and so on) are routines embedded within larger texts — they are, in a sense, digressions — while snowclones, like idioms and clichés, are expressions fully integrated into their texts.

However, the lines are by no means clear, and there are many problematic cases (not all jokes are templatic, and there are short non-templatic digressions, like proverbs). There’s isn’t necessarily a bright line separating interruptive from fully integrated material.

Outdated Zippy

Zippy and Mr. Toad on outdated formulaic language:

Color me X!

Yet?

Variants of the Are We X Yet? snowclone turn up in Zippy every so often. And now, in the tradition of this, this, and this, we get still another:

fold like a cheap X

More snowclone fun! Found by David Fenton in a posting on DailyKos.com:

After weeks of talking tough about how they were too fiscally responsible to take stimulus money from the federal government, the cast of 2012 GOP governor-wannabes, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford, folded like cheap tents…

Fenton found the cheap tent version surprising and puzzling; he would have expected cheap suit instead. It turns out that both variants of the Fold Like a Cheap X ‘give up easily’ snowclone are reasonably frequent — and that there are variants with lots of other fillers for X.

The whole X

The saga of the whole nine yards has been going on for some time now, focused on where the two parts of the idiom — nine and yards — come from; Michael Quinion has an article (last revised in 2005) on it here, and more recently Ben Zimmer has posted on Language Log on it, here and here (the latter with a cite for “all nine yards of goodies”). I’m going to suggest that this might be a fruitless search, akin to asking who the original Mac, Joe, Charlie, Stan, etc. was in vocatives addressed to men.

[Added 12 April: an update on the whole nine yards by Ben Zimmer is available here.]

What I’m suggesting is that THE WHOLE X ‘the entire matter, everything having to do with the matter’ is a formula with X filled in by various inventive expressions. Neutral expressions like the while thing/business/package might have been the model –

We had a blow-out celebration: champagne, ice sculptures, the whole thing/business/package.

but there are more colorful fillers for X.

Snowclonelet composites

Since it just came up on ADS-L with reference to “X porn” (in examples like “food porn”): English has a number of N1 + N2 composite patterns, most of them non-subsective (the denotation of the composite is not within the denotation of N2), but all of them exhibiting some semantic oddities, and all of them formulaic to some degree, hence snowclone-like. In other words, “snowclonelet composites”. My current collection — which I’m sure is far from complete — has instances of

X fag, X porn, X queen, X rage, X virgin, X whore

The details are different for different cases. Some of them have been discussed on ADS-L (“X porn”, “X rage”), one (“X virgin”) on Language Log (here and here), the rest documented so far just from my e-mail and from Google searches.

Group therapy talk

My friend Max Vasilatos was recently asked (for complex reasons that aren’t relevant here) to supply, to a mutual friend, expressions that would be typical of group therapist talk in the United States. She — yes, Max is a woman — brought the topic up at a lunch last week with Ned Deily and me, and we started cataloguing jargony platitudes. A few are below:

Use your words.
We own our feelings here.
Remember, when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
We’re not here to take each other’s inventory.
Now we will do a trust exercise.
This is a safe space where you can say anything, anything at all.
There is no such thing as a stupid question.

(The last two of these are usually followed, in a matter of minutes, by a judgmental pronouncement from the therapist.)

The point is not to make an inventory of these, but to remark on something that transfixed us early on: reciting these expressions is like producing those evil bits of music that you can’t get out of your head: earworms. They’re catchphrase earworms. As Max said to her correspondent: “Now I’m going to be thinking of these all day, damn you, you evil person!”