1200. This week, we look at snowclones like “X is the new Y,” including where the name came from and why we find them so satisfying. Then, we look at how to make abbreviations like “RBI” plural, including questions about apostrophes, single letters, and periods.
1200. This week, we look at snowclones like “X is the new Y,” including where the name came from and why we find them so satisfying. Then, we look at how to make abbreviations like “RBI” plural, including questions about apostrophes, single letters, and periods.
The snowclones segment was written by Karen Lunde. Find her on igofirst.org.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty. This week, we’ll talk about fun language templates called snowclones, think “to be or not to be,” and then we’ll look at how to make abbreviations like “RBI” plural.
by Karen Lunde
Imagine you're out with a group of friends and someone asks if you should stop and get some lunch. You might quip something like, "To eat or not to eat; that is the question!"
Your little play on Shakespeare's famous line actually has a name — it's called a "snowclone." It's a sort of phrase template that people endlessly remix, swapping in new words but keeping the familiar structure. Start with a super well-known phrase like "To BLANK or not to BLANK" and you get "To eat or not to eat." Or "Keep calm and carry on" becomes "Keep calm and pet the dog."
And we have a very precise origin story for this particular neologism! The term "snowclone" was coined at precisely 10:56:57 PM on Thursday, January 15, 2004 on the popular linguistics blog Language Log. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum was complaining about a journalistic trope: the claim that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. He noted that journalists continually adapted this into statements like, "If Eskimos have N words for snow, surely [Group X] has Y words for [Z]," and he wanted a name for this adaptable, "fill-in-the-blank" phrase structure. So economist and screenwriter Glen Whitman suggested "snowclone," and that's how we arrived at a clever term for this linguistic quirk.
It's worth noting for the record that the Inuit people use more words to describe snow than we typically do, but the claim that they have "hundreds" of words for snow has been exaggerated over the years, and if you want to really dig into the details, I did a whole interview with Charles Kemp on the Inuit "words for snow" controversy back in episode 1155.
So anyway, the key feature of a snowclone is that it's instantly recognizable even when you swap out words. If I say "Podcasts are the new blogs" you'd likely understand that I'm playing on the well-known fashion cliché "Pink is the new black." And that phrase became the title of a book and Netflix series, "Orange is the New Black." That's how embedded snowclones can get in pop culture.
Researchers have described snowclones as "customizable phrasal templates." Our brains love them because they deliver two things at once: familiarity and novelty. We start with a familiar phrase. The structure — like X is the new Y — that is stored in our memory, but then the new variation gives us a delightful twist.
Snowclones also spread easily, especially through memes and internet culture. Once a phrase becomes culturally famous, people can generate new, clever versions almost automatically from its basic structure. That's why, 400 years later, people are still riffing on "To be or not to be" with things like: "To binge watch or not to binge watch" or "To nap or not to nap."
In fact, although the term "snowclones" is new-ish, the underlying human tendency to play with language is ancient. The Bard himself gave us more than one formulaic expression that we can twist into something else. Think of "Brevity is the soul of wit" from "Hamlet." You might hear modern variations like "Brevity is the soul of email," but it's pretty likely you recognize the centuries-old source.
Another surprisingly old snowclone is "One man's meat is another man's poison." But wait! That's probably not the phrase you're familiar with. It's "One man's trash is another man's treasure," right?
Nope. The older proverb is absolutely "One man's meat is another man's poison." And it literally goes back at least as far as the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who lived from about 99-55 BCE. He wrote a piece called "On the Nature of Things" and said roughly: "What is food to some may be bitter poison to others."
That's not exactly the old English wording, but it's the same thought: People's tastes and temperaments are different, and what benefits them might not benefit someone else. The phrase evolved a bit over time, but it was so widespread by the 17th century that another writer referred to it as "That old moth-eaten proverb." Basically, an Elizabethan version of rolling your eyes and saying, "Ugh! Not this cliché again."
The version "One man's trash is another man's treasure" is a snowclone from a time before we had a name for the phenomenon, but it's still pretty recent in language terms, becoming more widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now it's the lingo of thrifting enthusiasts everywhere.
So, by 1604 we'd already had a snowclone-like ancient phrase that had become so popular and overused it was dubbed a "moth-eaten proverb." And that means people have been complaining about overused sayings for at least four centuries. Some things, apparently, are the new old things.
That segment was by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. She writes I'll Go First, a newsletter where she shares her story, then hands you a weekly writing prompt and a metaphorical pen. Find her on igofirst.org.
by Mignon Fogarty
And I couldn't resist adding a second short tip this week because with baseball season underway, it’s a good time to answer questions from listeners who have asked how to make an abbreviation such as "RBI" plural. It can be confusing, since it's the R-part ("run") that is becoming plural. Should it be "RsBI," or "RBIs" or something else?
Even though it doesn't make absolute logical sense, you make initialisms and acronyms plural by adding an S to the end no matter what part would be plural if you wrote the whole thing out: So even when it would stand for "runs batted in," you write it "RBIs," with a lowercase S on the end.
You'll sometimes hear baseball fans argue that you shouldn't add the S because "RBI" stands for "runs batted in," so why not just say "he drove in 100 RBI"? It's a reasonable objection, but not the standard recommendation. I can confirm that the Associated Press, the Chicago Manual of Style, and Merriam-Webster all recommend "RBIs" for the plural.
In the past, some publications used apostrophes to make acronyms and abbreviations plural, so for example, a decade ago, it was common to see something like "RBI's" or "CD's" with apostrophes in the New York Times. But today, all major publications and style guides I'm aware of recommend simply adding an S (without an apostrophe).
There's one place the apostrophe does hang on though: making a single letter plural. A pitcher who records ten strikeouts has ten K's (with an apostrophe), not ten Ks (just "Ks") because "Ks" is hard to read. But that's a narrow exception for lone letters.
Whether you put periods after the letters in an acronym such as "NASA" or an initialism such as "RBI" is a style choice, but neither the Chicago Manual of Style nor the AP Stylebook recommend using periods.
So the bottom line is that the most accepted way to abbreviate "runs batted in" is "RBIs" with just a lowercase S on the end and no periods.
Finally, I'm out of recordings of your familects, so I'll tell you one of my own this week, but get thinking. I know everyone would rather hear your stories, so if you have one, send it to me. The instructions are in the show notes, and it's easy.
Pat and I go for a lot of walks in our neighborhood, and it's very quiet, so we usually just walk down the middle of the road, but every once in a while a car will come, and then we're scrambling to get out of the way because it's such a surprise, and sometimes I can't decide which way to go and weave around a bit, and we'll laugh and say, "Quail maneuver B" because it reminds us of the quail who run around erratically when they see us, like keystone cops after plan A didn't work. So one of our familects is to use "Quail maneuver B" to describe anyone who quickly weaves around like an anxious quail.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Steven Schapansky; Holly Hutchings; and Dan Feierabend, who rearranges his living room furniture so often that the recliners are on sliders.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That’s all. Thanks for listening.