雪克隆，新的陳詞濫調

“老兵永不死，只是漸凋零。”

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·麥克阿瑟將軍(Gen. Douglas MacArthur，上圖中)從一首古老的軍隊民謠中摘出了這句話，并且在向國會發(fā)表告別講話時讓其聲名大噪。

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.

當時這位五星上將不知道自己引起了一堆所謂“雪克隆”(snowclones)的流行，這個較為新穎的語言學現(xiàn)象解釋起來要比用起來難多了。

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.”)

根據(jù)語言學教授杰弗里·K·普勒姆(Geoffrey K. Pullum)在2003年給出的定義，雪克隆是“可定制、能立刻被人認出、陳舊，被引用或錯誤引用的短語或句子，可用于大量不同充滿玩笑意味的變體中”。(普勒姆還稱它們是“懶惰的記者使用的某種需要遣詞造句，能夠適應各種變化的陳詞濫調框架”。)

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.

我們試著來一個吧。用麥克阿瑟將軍的模版，“老高爾夫球手不死，他們只是不發(fā)球了”就是一個雪克隆。以X和Y作為替代，雪克隆就很好發(fā)現(xiàn)了：X是我的中間名，幾個X缺一個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.”

尚不清楚是誰第一個說“pink is the new black”(粉色是新的黑色)這句話的，但如今，它是最受歡迎的雪克隆模版之一，其中著名的例子要數(shù)Netflix為劇集起名“Orange Is the New Black”(《女子監(jiān)獄》)。

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

對這一主題的研究似乎是半嚴肅式的：有一篇文章的標題是“Snowclone Is the New Cliché”(雪克隆是新的陳詞濫調)。