Snowclone on Language Log (and So Can You!) (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE


With apologies, I quote almost all of Geoff Pullum's recent Language Log
post (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005075.html ):


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October 31, 2007
And so can you (be)

The quick eye of Mark Liberman recently spotted what may be the fastest
ever emergence of a new phrase into snowclonehood when Steven Colbert's
book title I Am America (And So Can You!) was picked up by Guy Trebay of
the New York Times after just three weeks: Trebay's pastiched article
title She's Famous (and So Can You) has just the same syntactic property
- an ungrammatical (or at least strikingly and off-puttingly unusual)
deletion of a repeat occurrence of be. [I'm assuming here that I am
America (and so can you be!) is fully grammatical and acceptable, and so
is She's famous (and so can you be). The near-prohibition of deleting
non-finite forms of be under identity of sense was studied in a nice
doctoral dissertation by Nancy Levin at The Ohio State University some
years ago.]

****************

Geoff has analyzed this snowclone as if the grammatical error to be
corrected is in the second half of the snowclone.  There's nothing wrong
with that, but to my mind, the part that reads the "rightest" (in the
context of the joke) is the second half, and mentally I try to force the
first half into a correct structure.  That isn't as easy to do as adding
"be" to the end of the second half (which may be why Geoff did it the
way he did it).  I suppose that it could be reworked into "I Am [Being]
America (And So Can You!)".

Not having the linguistic training of Geoff or others on this list, I'm
treading on dangerous ground when I analyze this snowclone.  But to me,
it works because it is contrasting the first phrase (which has a
state-of-being verb) with the second (which wants to refer back to an
active verb).  Geoff's "fix" makes the second phrase consistent with
state-of-being; my mind wants to make the first phrase have some kind of
active verb.  And the difficulty of doing that is why the book title is
funny.
Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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