{"id":14207,"date":"2012-09-26T10:16:08","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T17:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2012\/09\/26\/a-phrase-grows-in-brooklyn.html"},"modified":"2012-09-26T10:16:08","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T17:16:08","slug":"a-phrase-grows-in-brooklyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2012\/09\/26\/a-phrase-grows-in-brooklyn\/","title":{"rendered":"A phrase grows in Brooklyn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Recently happened across a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Snowclone\">snowclone<\/a> that I hadn't really noticed before: phrases of the form &ldquo;an X grows in Brooklyn,&rdquo; riffing on the title <cite>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>Headline writers in particular seem to find it irresistible. A quick Google for [\"a * grows in Brooklyn\"] and variants of that produced the following very incomplete list:<\/p>\n<ul>\n  <li>American family<\/li>\n  <li>arena<\/li>\n  <li>Bionic Garden<\/li>\n  <li>brie (bonus points for rhyming with the original)<\/li>\n  <li>'Burgh sandwich<\/li>\n  <li>child<\/li>\n  <li>congestion [possibly not actually a reference; it was missing the initial &ldquo;a,&rdquo; and I can imagine someone saying it without intending to snowclone]<\/li>\n  <li>cook<\/li>\n  <li>Giant Sinkhole<\/li>\n  <li>gourd<\/li>\n  <li>Jew<\/li>\n  <li>me<\/li>\n  <li>natural-gas pipeline<\/li>\n  <li>Opera<\/li>\n  <li>scene<\/li>\n  <li>Sci Fi Bookstore\/Publisher [somehow doesn't have the same ring to it]<\/li>\n  <li>shoe<\/li>\n  <li>tee<\/li>\n  <li>union<\/li>\n  <li>tour<\/li>\n  <li>Tr&egrave;s<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And so on.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the snowclone is actually more adaptable than that; it's really &ldquo;a X grows in Y.&rdquo; (Where Y is a place.)<\/p>\n<ul>\n  <li>A Tree Grows in Joplin<\/li>\n  <li>A cactus grows in Buffalo<\/li>\n  <li>A feud grows in Jersey<\/li>\n  <li>A Factory Grows in Haiti<\/li>\n  <li>A Green Home Grows in Bucktown<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But as you get further from the original, it gets harder to tell whether the writer intended a reference or not. &ldquo;A Flower Grows in Ireland&rdquo;? Possibly. &ldquo;A Flower Grows in Stone&rdquo;? Probably not.<\/p>\n<p>Arguably, the snowclone template is even more flexible: &ldquo;a X Ys in Z.&rdquo; For example, if a certain national laboratory were to develop phosphorescent insects, I'm sure that dozens of headlines would proclaim, &ldquo;A Flea Glows in Brookhaven.&rdquo; But when you get to this level of distance from the original phrase, you have to maintain strong ties (such as rhyming or other similarities) to make it look like a reference at all; a phrase like &ldquo;a baby perambulates in San Francisco&rdquo; probably doesn't retain enough of the original to be recognizable.<\/p>\n<p>I imagine it would be possible to characterize\/categorize the ways in which a snowclone can recognizably stretch, but that goes way beyond the scope of this entry, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently happened across a snowclone that I hadn&#8217;t really noticed before: phrases of the form &ldquo;an X grows in Brooklyn,&rdquo; riffing on the title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Headline&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phrases","category-snowclones"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}