Snowclones as Collective Poetry4/19/2023 If you’ve been sailing through the internet long enough, you will encounter multiple template sentences repeated through a series of contexts often with a humorous tone. Like: If I had a nickel for every time ___ I would have 2 nickels, which isn’t much but is weird it happened twice. In a 2003 blog post on Language Log, linguist Jeffrey K Pullum asked for a word that could describe “the linguistic phenomenon of a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants''. To which Glen Whitman answered with the neologism “snowclone”. Most snowclones come from pop culture but some started as tourism campaigns like the “I <3 x” snowclone that came out of an initiative to promote tourism in New York state or as 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra: "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", published in the Communications of the ACM in the case of “X is considered harmful”. With the rise of the pandemic, snowclones became a popular way in which people expressed their emotions and opinions. The most popular snowclones were “to x or not to x” mostly when talking about masks and “the mother of all X” with x being replaced with crises or any other synonyms. As David Tizón Couto says in their article Creatividad lingüística durante ‘la madre de todas las crisis’: el caso de los ‘snowclones’ en inglés / Linguistic creativity during “the mother of all crises”: the case of snowclones in english: “Snowclones are creative resources that have helped describe the sudden change in a more conventional manner that have made possible to present negative meanings through recognisable formulas [...] so that the reader can digest the social and economic unrest a bit better.” My favorite snowclone is #yourboyfriendmeme. Where the speaker apologizes to “you” about whatever they have done to “your” boyfriend. From baking him to changing his format from .to .png. This tool can be used as literary criticism; your boyfriend is a vessel to explain different literary tropes and pop-culture archetypes. Of course your boyfriend isn’t always a boy, they can be a girl, or even non-binary (though I haven’t seen it as much). Like in this post by @/royalrebelpropaganda in tumblr: yeah we put your girl in the fandom and they villainized her beyond comprehension. yeah sorry they took out all the nuance and made the argument completely black and white. yeah my bad. we can’t reverse it. sorry. PBS Series’ Otherwords has argued that snowclones are linguistic memes, and I don’t think anyone can refute that. But can they be more? Can they be poetry? Poetry is a transformation of language, poetry is everywhere. In the same vein snowclones are transformed each time they are used, and they are everywhere too. A verse that is re-interpret time and time again like multiple readers finds themselves in metaphors. A virtual broken-phone. After poetry where the after is now and the poet is after isn’t mentioned. A collaboration between poets that are stranger to each other, each giving birth to an idea with different meaning but the same words or the same words with a different idea. Or maybe, snowclones are a new poetry form like haikus or sonnets, which each follow a template left by others. If poetry is the transformation of language, the play through it, aren’t snowclones a perfect fit? Ari Ochoa Petzois a Mexican-Venezuelan bi genderfluid writer. They like dancing to old music and history. In their free time you can find xem trying to coerce their friends to participate in another of their crazy projects.
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