"I, for one, welcome our new * overlords"
John Hardy of the wonderful blog Laputan Logic writes that
Apparently another of N'kisi's
remarkable abilities is to uncover yet more snowclones.
This instance was
spotted on Metafilter
yesterday:
"I, for one, welcome our new telepathic parrot overlords "
Plugging this snowclone
template
"I, for one, welcome our new *
overlords"
into Google returns 1940 hits.
Indeed it does! And "welcome our new * * overlords" garners another 442, while "welcome our new * * * overlords" nets 235, and "welcome our new * * * * overlords" snares another 38. Perhaps someone with a few spare minutes will compile a
histogram of the 2600+ substitutions in these templates, thus giving us
all new insight into the mythic fears
of the net (or at least of the net segments that have picked up this meme from slashdot, Jonah Goldberg and similar sources).
Danyel Fisher wrote in with the original Simpsons quote (from
Deep Space Homer) in context:
News announcer Kent Brockman mistakes a
floating ant in a space shuttle experiment floating close to the camera
for a giant space ant:
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will
-- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this
vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely
enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the
ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be
helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
[Update 11/8/2006: note that Goldberg's use of this phrasal template is distinctly
not submissive, as explained
here with respect to the 2006 midterm elections.]
Danyel's own list of snowclone candidates is
here
.
[Update: more on variants of this pattern is
here.]
[And more on the phrasal templates that some of us call snowclones is here.
Posted by Mark Liberman at January 29, 2004 12:46 PM