雪克隆，新的陈词滥调

“老兵永不死，只是渐凋零。”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, above center, took those words from an old Army ballad and made them famous 67 years ago this week in his farewell address to Congress.

67年前的本周，道格拉斯·麦克阿瑟将军(Gen. Douglas MacArthur，上图中)从一首古老的军队民谣中摘出了这句话，并且在向国会发表告别讲话时让其声名大噪。

Little did that five-star American general know that he had just given rise to an army of so-called snowclones, a relatively new linguistic phenomenon that’s tougher to explain than it is to use.

当时这位五星上将不知道自己引起了一堆所谓“雪克隆”(snowclones)的流行，这个较为新颖的语言学现象解释起来要比用起来难多了。

A snowclone, as defined by the linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum in 2003, is a “customizable, instantly recognizable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants.” (Mr. Pullum also called them “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists.”)

根据语言学教授杰弗里·K·普勒姆(Geoffrey K. Pullum)在2003年给出的定义，雪克隆是“可定制、能立刻被人认出、陈旧，被引用或错误引用的短语或句子，可用于大量不同充满玩笑意味的变体中”。(普勒姆还称它们是“懒惰的记者使用的某种需要遣词造句，能够适应各种变化的陈词滥调框架”。)

Let’s try one. Using General MacArthur’s template, “Old golfers never die, they just lose their drive,” would be a snowclone. Using X and Y as stand-ins, snowclones are easy to spot: X is my middle name, a few Xs short of a Y, and so on.

我们试着来一个吧。用麦克阿瑟将军的模版，“老高尔夫球手不死，他们只是不发球了”就是一个雪克隆。以X和Y作为替代，雪克隆就很好发现了：X是我的中间名，几个X缺一个Y，等等。

It’s unclear who first said “pink is the new black,” but it is now one of the most popular snowclone templates, notably producing the title of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black.”

尚不清楚是谁第一个说“pink is the new black”(粉色是新的黑色)这句话的，但如今，它是最受欢迎的雪克隆模版之一，其中著名的例子要数Netflix为剧集起名“Orange Is the New Black”(《女子监狱》)。

Study of the subject appears half-serious: One article was titled “Snowclone Is the New Cliché.”

对这一主题的研究似乎是半严肃式的：有一篇文章的标题是“Snowclone Is the New Cliché”(雪克隆是新的陈词滥调)。