ViralWorld

2004·Early web, before YouTube

The snowclone

This one never had a single recording. What is known is below.

  • SourceNo single original
  • MediaNot held by ViralWorld

The sentence with a hole in it — the mechanism behind most catchphrase memes, and the word linguists coined for it.

The story

What this was

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.

You were there

More from 2004

The same internet

Early web, before YouTube

What we know

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
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.
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