One of the internet’s most powerful features as an influence on language is its ability to make the innovations of a minority instantly accessible to everyone else—so long as the innovation seems useful, amusing, and/or important.
A case in point is an October 2003 entry to the estimable linguistics site Language Log, in which British-American linguist Geoffrey Pullum explained his belief that “we need a name for . . . a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.” Pullum was asking his readers to come up with a word with which he hoped to skewer lazy thinking and language—and they duly obliged.84
Invitations to create new words are not exclusive to the digital age (although one of the most famous such stories, which holds that the word quiz was introduced by an Irish theater manager in the nineteenth century for a bet, is almost certainly apocryphal), but the business of doing so has grown immeasurably easier. So it was that, in January 2004, another language blogger, Glen Whitman, proposed on his site Agoraphilia that the word snowclone be coined for the job, as an invocation of the thousands of writers using the hackneyed formulation “If Eskimos have N words for snow . . .” Pullum approved of the term, and duly declared it official.85
As Pullum also noted, one unique property of digital as opposed to merely written words is the precision with which we are able to record their transmission. So, he declared in a note to future lexicographers, “since we have a record of the exact time at which Glen hit Send and transmitted the new term to me (the first person to read it), lexicographers are in luck here: they can date the coining of snowclone to . . . 22:56:57 (that’s 3 seconds before 10:57 p.m.) on Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California.”
A word used only by two people is one of little interest either to lexicographers or to anyone else. In the case of snowclone, however, the demand for this new term was evidently real enough, for it soon made its way off his blog and out into the wider world. Query Google about “snowclones” today and you’ll turn up over 30,000 results—including a “snowclone database,” representing almost five years’ worth of dedicated digital spotting.
A particularly frequent offender here is the “X is the new Y” formulation, as in “green is the new black”—a phrase that has spawned generations of indolent offspring (“kite surfing is the new black”). But snowclone isn’t the only word we can thank Language Log and its erudite operators for—another of the site’s gifts to the world being the term eggcorn. This time, the coiner was Geoffrey Pullum himself, in September 2003, the challenge being to coin a term for “the habit of substituting one near-identical sounding word or phrase for another, as in the use of the words ‘egg corn’ to mean ‘acorn’ or—two cases that I frequently seem to encounter—the use of pendant where penchant is meant, or of gambit where gamut is meant.”86
In each case, there needs to be not only confusion but something apposite about the error—an idiosyncratic pleasure to the new term that echoes the process by which new words themselves are formed. Eggcorn is worth still more hits than snowclone—and marks another gift to language conceived and propagated through the efforts of online word watchers.