To “Christen” this blog, so to speak, let’s start out simply. (*Edit–okay it didn’t end up being so simple after all.)

There are many things in this world worthy of pure unadulterated love, such as manatees/dugongs (sirenia), cheesecake, old horror movies with Vincent Price, limericks, and fake british accents. To that ludicrously impartial list I would like to add snowclones.

Snowclones bear little resemblance to “snowcones” because, for the most part, they are not corporeal objects. It would be possible to (of course) construct a representation of one with stencils or a printer, but snowclones are semantic constructions.

A classic example of a snowclone is “X is the new Y.”  Note that it can be completed nearly an infinite number of ways (”Pink is the new black,” “Democrats are the new Republicans,” “Twilight is the new Harry Potter,” etc… ad infinitum) and according to a google search for the non-variable elements, significant variation can be found among the results.¹

More delicious snowclones include:

Got X?
Im in ur X Ying ur Z
Who are you and what have you done with X?
A kinder, gentler X
Not your Y’s X (where Y is usually something like “Daddy” or “Granny,” but not necessarily)
If by X you mean Y

If you are interested in reading more about snowclones, start here. For now, I’d like to switch gears. I would actually like to contest the status of that last one on the list (If by X you mean Y) which is up on the queue at The Snowclones Database.

I hate it when my students do this but, according to Wikipedia (which, in turn, retrieved the information from somewhere else), “[a snowclone] emphasizes the use of a familiar (and often particular) formula and previous cultural knowledge of the reader to express information about an idea.”  The statement If by X you mean Y does not strike me as referencing any prior cultural or linguistic experience. At least not obviously. Sure, you probably would have to have heard someone say it before, but there is no second signified that is inherent to the phrasing. To rephrase: when you utter the statement, you are not intentionally making some kind of journalistic joke in the same way that you might if you were to say “Got Semiotics?” In the latter case, your phrase would likely be intended as signifying both that knowledge of semiotics is essential, and that you were familiar with the cultural artifact (snowclone) “Got X?”

Even if the cultural artifact’s context is unknown to the speaker of the snowclone, people who use snowclones will always be aware that they are using a shared linguistic construction. I Like X cannot be a snowclone for the reason that no shared construction is usually acknowledged by its use and, in my opinion, neither is it the case with If by X you mean Y.

I could be completely off-base here, but the phrase If by X you mean Y strikes me as just about the only way to snarkily redefine someone else’s term. I am, of course, open to criticism.