conditional Inuit

[Victor Steinbok]

I stand corrected with a thousand different grins.

I wonder how many of these were tongue-in-cheek--of "I am the Pope" variety.

VS-)

On 12/28/2011 11:22 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> 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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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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