[Ads-l] "There's X, and then there's X"

[Ben Zimmer]

One variant of the snowclone shows up in so-called contrastive focus
reduplication (aka lexical cloning). Here are two examples from Ghomeshi et
al.'s "SALAD-salad Paper," suggesting that the reduplicated "X-X" form can
fill either slot in the "There's __ and (then) there's ___" template.

"Wonder Years" S2E2 (1988)
There's LOGIC-logic and then there's 12-year-old-in-love logic.

"Virtual Sexuality" (1999)
There's cool-geeky and there's GEEKY-geeky.

https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/redup-corpus.html


On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 2:51 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Ben. I was just wondering because I can't find usage before the
> mid-90s, and I would have thought it was older.
>
> DanG
>
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 1:24 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 1:03 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> >
> > > Discussion of Clinton e-mails led Obama to say, "there's classified,
> and
> > > then there's classified"
> > >
> > > Has anyone ever traced this formation back into history?
> > >
> >
> > I don't know of any historical treatment, but Larry noted the snowclone
> in
> > 2012:
> >
> >
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2012-October/122607.html
> >
> > Further discussion in English usage forums:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.usage.english/mN7UD5T93EE
> >
> >
> http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33307/meaning-of-a-quote-in-movie-casino-royale-2006
> >
> >
>

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