The snowclone
This is something people said. There is no recording of it to show.
2004·Early web, before YouTube·informative
A stock phrase with slots in it, reused by swapping the words: “X is the new Y”, “In space, no one can hear you X”.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 2004
- Format
- Phrase
- Made by
- Named by Glen Whitman, an economics professor, in answer to a request by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum
- Where it started
- The blog Language Log
- Origin
- No single original
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
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 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.
What it createdWhat came out of it
- The name comes from the best-known example: “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have M words for Y.”1
Why it is here: copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
Where it came fromWhat we know
This spread through many posts rather than one identifiable original. No copy is held here — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this. It spread through many posts rather than from one identifiable original.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things