Fwd: more astounding acronyms

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 12/15/05, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> At 7:38 PM +0000 12/15/05, Michael Quinion wrote:
> >So you didn't. What would Freud have said about my misreading of
> >"wordlorn" as "lovelorn", I wonder?
>
> He would have noticed that "lovelorn" is an actual word, while
> "wordlorn" was an underhanded nonce construct [...]

A snowclone, even...

http://www.google.com/search?q=advice-to-the-*-lorn+-love-lorn

(First page has advice to the Mormon-lorn, flu-lorn, lyric-lorn,
lab-lorn, luck-lorn, Lovecraft-lorn, library-lorn, etc. Initial "L"
works best, preserving the alliteration of "lovelorn.")

Speaking of snowclones, they seem to be gathering a following on
Wikipedia. The entry for "snowclone" has been steadily expanding, as
has a new one listing examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Snowclones


--Ben Zimmer