In 1979, a cultural milestone occurred when, in the film Apocalypse Now, Robert Duvall's character, Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, declared, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."
The words soon became a repeatable, adaptable refrain. A Google search almost 30 years later reveals writers humorously praising the A.M. stench of marshmallows, impeachment, ectoplasm, nepotism and eggnog.
Linguists now have a name for such fill-in-the-blank idioms: snowclones. Christened by Glen Whitman, an economist at California State University at Northridge, the term snowclone was inspired by the frequently repeated yet inaccurate saying, "If Eskimos have N words for snow, then X have Y words for Z." Lazy copywriters, bloggers and journalists love snowclones. They often originate in TV shows, (Oh my God, they killed X!), commercials (Not your father's X) or even Taoist texts (The X that can be spoken of is not the true X).
But there's more to snowclones than cliched prose. Within social groups, such refrains have currency, says Arnold Zwicky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. "Snowclones are badges of [cultural literacy] and expressions of solidarity with others."
