Snowclones are my love language

In cyberspace, everyone can hear you meme

After I write something pretty lengthy, especially when I give it extra writing time over the course of a week, I tend to crash. I spend more time than normal thinking about the other things I could have included, the places where I’ve been looser than normal (in the interests of getting as much written as possible), and so forth. As much as I dislike the binge-and-purge model of writing that we sometimes facilitate in academia, I must admit that I fall prey to it myself.

So I’m back in my Friday writing group, two weeks after having chunked out several posts about scale, without anything more to say (on that topic, at least) for the moment. So today is for something a little lighter, I think.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

This is an old idea, one that I think about every once in a while, yet rarely enough that when I do so, I end up having to look it back up to get it right. And that’s the idea of snowclones. The term itself has its own Wikipedia page, which describes the snowclone as “a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants.“ You can track back the conversation that led to the term on that page, too, but it’s a little more than 20 years old now, and it emerged originally from linguist Geoffrey Pullum’s observation that journalists were apt to fall back on well-worn phrases in place of actual writing. He defined snowclones as “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists,” citing stories that opened with the (myth?) cliché about Eskimo/Inuit words for snow

Here is a nice one from The Economist last week:

If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy.

Pullum originally describes this as a “bleached conditional,” that is, a sentence phrased as conditional that carries no (conditional) force. The “if…then” of the line from the Economist is empty (colorless?). The updated term (which Pullum solicited) is a clever little twist on snowcones, the summertime treat that amounts to a cup of snow into which you can drizzle syrup of any flavor. Identifying these phrases is kind of fun, and Erin O’Connor maintained a snowclone database for a while, which lists a number of them.

As soon as you start seeing examples, you will begin to see snowclones everywhere. One of the most evergreen is the reliable “X is the new Y”—for a long time, just about anything was “the new black,” and don’t get me started on the various age permutations. In space, no one can hear you X. We’re going to need a bigger X. Have X, will travel. These are not the X you’re looking for. You get the idea. (It’s no accident that a lot of these are lines cribbed from popular entertainment, shows popular enough to provide the shared frame of reference that makes the line both memorable and adaptable.)

Like I mentioned above, the idea of describing all of these clichés collectively as “snowclones” is one that appeals to me, but I almost always end up having to dig back through old Language Log posts to refresh my memory. I don’t mind that too much—they’re fun and linguistics is interesting to me—but I figured that maybe writing about it here would fix them a little more securely in my mind.

I’ve found myself thinking lately about snowclones because I’ve noticed an uptick in a particular phrase that I think qualifies, and that’s the idea of “love languages.” Maybe it’s just the time that I spend on the AITA subreddit, but I feel like the phrase “X is my love language” is having a moment. If “Know Your Meme” is an accurate measure of such things, then I’m not the only one to think so.

[As I was winding this post down, a friend pointed me to science YouTuber Rebecca Watson, who talks about noticing the same uptick, and has a nice 20-minute explainer on the subject, including the WaPo article cited below.]

Is it fair to dismiss the idea as a passing fancy? I’m not sure. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine shared a Washington Post piece on the idea—it’s about thirty years old, originating in a book (The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts) written by Baptist pastor Gary Chapman, which has sold “over 20 million copies!”

The WaPo article focuses primarily on a recent paper that casts some doubt on the phenomenon itself, “conclud[ing] that core assumptions about love languages stand upon shaky ground unsupported by empirical evidence.” To my mind, this suggests that it may occupy the same sort of territory as Myers-Briggs, astrology, and other brands of personality tests. That is, it’s an oversimplification that, if taken too seriously, can lead us down problematic paths or lock us into self-destructive or effacing patterns. In the case of Chapman’s love languages, for instance, “love language thinking can do harm, encouraging adherents to stay in difficult or even abusive relationships.” In this sense, and at the risk of sounding a little dismissive, I think “love languages” as an idea is horoscopic. As a means for helping us think differently about ourselves, it might have some heuristic value, but that value diminishes substantially the more literally and seriously we take it.

Speaking of something as one’s love language might just simply be an attempt to signify that it’s something we particularly like to do and one of the ways that we share ourselves with people. For example, for the longest time, I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was good at listening to someone talk about their work (and/or reading something that they’d written) and coming up with an additional book or article that would contribute to their project in some way. The less academic way of describing this, I suppose, would be to say that I think myself pretty good at connecting the people around me with resources that will help them. And because I’m pretty good at it, I put more effort into it than I might otherwise. Maybe that’s my love language, nerdy acts of service.

But honestly, it wouldn’t really occur to me to frame it that way. It’s more interesting to me to understand the phrase “love language” itself as a snowclone—we adopt (and in the case snowclones, adapt) these phrases as conversational shortcuts. And the phrases themselves, if they’re catchy and recognizable, circulate through social contagion, the same way that talking to someone about their sign might prompt you to consider those ways that the zodiac actually gets some things right about yourself.

In other words, insofar as there’s help to be found in the idea of love languages, I’d suggest that it’s actually rhetorical. That is, in the same way that “Thank you for coming to my TED talk” is a social media gambit for self-effacement (allowing us to poke gentle fun at ourselves if we say something that comes off as self-important), love languages might be construed as a memetic prompt to think about ourselves and the way that we treat the people around us. It might encourage self-reflection and empathy in us, not because love languages are any more constructive or effective than other pseudo-psychological forms of personality typing. “Love language” is a metaphor (or an analogy), which “works” precisely to the degree that it resonates with the people who find it helpful. Sometimes, your horoscope might include a piece of advice that proves beneficial that day. Some folks use tarot readings to prompt introspection about their lives.

Rebecca Watson ultimately concludes that the idea of love languages is pretty inoffensive, and might in some cases be helpful for people, and I guess I feel the same way. It’s not an idea that will change my life, but I don’t begrudge the people for whom it does.