A variant on snowclone "We are all X now"

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Sat Feb 11 09:38:50 UTC 2012


I'm clipping the first paragraph to provide context for the second.

http://goo.gl/SkNp8
> In Colorado's U.S. Senate election in 2010, the Republican candidate,
> Ken Buck, endorsed the "personhood" initiative during the primary. He
> later backed off that position, but Democrat Michael Bennet hammered
> Buck for it throughout the campaign. As the rest of the political map
> turned deep red that year, Buck lost -- and lost the vote of Colorado
> women by a whopping 17 points.
> ...
> Taken together -- Republicans' condemnation that birth control be a
> required benefit of health insurance, their insistence that Planned
> Parenthood lose all federal funding, their threat to cut federal Title
> X support for birth control and their support for "personhood"
> measures that threaten the legality of hormonal birth control --
> today’s Republican candidates are all Ken Buck now.

The key phrase is the very last one, following the m-dash. The reason
why this one differs somewhat from the rest of "We are all X" is because
"we" is "they" and the implication is negative--sort of like, "Boy, they
are going to get it now!". Actually, this is somewhat of a habit with
Maddow--I've heard her use the expression similarly before. It's a
particular style of sarcasm that is not shared with most other TV
commentators.

VS-)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list