The snowclone

A recognisable phrase with a slot: X is the new Y. In space, no one can hear you X. If Eskimos have N words for snow, then X have N words for Y. The last of those is where the name comes from — a journalistic cliché so overused that linguists at Language Log needed a term for the class and, in 2004, took one.

It first appeared in 2004, during early web, before YouTube.

It is the underlying machine of the phrase meme, and naming it made a whole category of internet humour analysable. Once you can see the slot, you can see that most catchphrases which spread do so because they are reusable rather than because they are funny — which is the single most useful thing anybody has said about how language moves online.

The word entered linguistic usage and then general usage. The Language Log post that coined it is one of the earliest cases of academic linguistics naming an internet phenomenon before journalism did, and the blog's coinage has outlasted most of the clichés it was invented to describe.