conditional Inuit

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> Yet another tortured twist on the tired snowclone:
>
> short URL: http://goo.gl/EKVs8
> http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/12/jessica-chastain-film-person-of-the-year-narrative.html
> > That outrage lasts pretty much the whole film, which presented a
> > special challenge to Chastain. If it’s true that the Eskimos have
> > hundreds of words for snow, she has to have had at least a hundred
> > different worried, puzzled, what-the-hell-is-going-on expressions for
> > this film, each building on the last. I ask if she actually had to
> > rehearse in front of a mirror to differentiate them all.
>
> So. let me get this straight--if it is /not/ true that Eskimos have
> hundreds of words for snow, then Jessica Chastain /may not have/ "at
> least a hundred different worried, puzzled, what-the-hell-is-going-on
> expressions". Good to know. Why do we care? No wonder the publication is
> called Paste!

Note that Geoffrey Pullum's original formulation of this phrasal
template (later dubbed a "snowclone") was exactly this kind of
"bleached conditional": "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X have Y
words for Z."

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000049.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000061.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html
http://snowclones.org/2007/05/31/if-eskimos-have-n-words-for-snow-x-have-y-words-for-z/

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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