Saturday, December 29, 2007

Language Fun: Snowclones and Blogs

Once again, my blogging time was taking up today by reading other blogs. Once I start reading good posts, I can't seem to stop myself. Here are some of the folks who stopped me from writing my own darn post.

The Grammarphobia Blog comes up with great topics on a regular basis and the whole things is strung out on one page. I have spent ages here, scrolling farther and farther back into time. I find some of this site too in-your-face promotional but the blog offers wordy fun.

Then Dan over at Notes form the copy editor won my attention by using the term snowclones, a word I had difficulty making clear and had not seen anywhere else.

Of course, since I switched to Haloscan, you can't see the comments on that post, but you readers were unclear on the concept. I, of course, clarified brilliantly. I see now that I must take the time to transfer my comments by hand.

Our Bold Hero, Dan, lead me to do a search on snowclones, through which I discovered the Snowclone Database. The posts are a bit dry, but the topic fascinates me enough that I read them for 20 minutes before remember that I was supposed to be doing research and not enjoying myself.

You can find, there, the ubiquitous snowclone “Im in ur X, Ying ur Z”, which started the whole conversation. That reminds me that I have yet to make the lolcat of my dreams. He's going to say, “Im in ur blog, gerunding ur verbs.” Imagine my surprise to see the “verbing your nouns” variant already in the database. I may have to revisit the drawing board.


0 comments: