“CHINA is the new Japan.” “Much ado about ballroom dancing.” When you read phrases like these in a newspaper, you’ve stumbled across a particular type of cliché: the snowclone.
Snowclones spring from a rich diversity of sources, from Shakespeare (“To X or not to X?”) to Star Trek (“It’s X, but not as we know it.”) and movie titles (“Dude, where’s my X?”) – if the source is known at all. Who, for instance, knows the origin of the snowclone “X is my middle name.”? When Saddam Hussein claimed the first Gulf war would be “the mother of all battles”, he coined an endlessly reusable formula that has given us the mother of all plagues, stink bombs,…
