April 25, 2005
I saw a variant on mrflip's post title recently. It was in a discussion pointing out the massive proliferation of phrases such as "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords" on the internet. (For those who don't recognize, it is a Simpsons quote). There are lots of phrases like this that people have tweaked and put on their weblogs or in the entertainment section of the newspaper. Examples include "X is the new black" and "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a X." Well, some language nerds decided to give the phenomenon a name: snowclone. Should make it easier to look up discussion about it in the future.
I was led there recently by this superb analysis of Linguistic Humor in the Simpsons. It goes beyond embiggens and cromulent to analyze Simpsons jokes in terms of Productive Derivational Morphology (Homer: "The word unblowupable is thrown around a lot these days") and Island Violation (Moe: "You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!")
natedogg, did you see it here perhaps?
yeah, that one too, but I saw this meta-analysis after that and thought, "well, if habcous is doing it it's worth posting about."
See also: Subtly Simpsons.
« Older And I for one welcome our new robo-DJ overlords! | Yes, IMBY Newer »
To post comments to a thread you must login or create a profile.
An arguably better and more interesting discussion on the language nerd weblog occurs here
posted by natedogg at 02:24PM CST on April 25