What is your startup the Uber of? The latest from the Silicon Valley cliché mill
From Shakespeare to social media, the enduring allure of the ‘snowclone’
How far are we from a new product being called “the Uber of colonoscopies?”
Weeks at most, I reckon. Over the past couple years, the startling success of ride-sharing app Uber has sparked a different kind of success: an abundance of comparisons using a similar recipe.
Forbes recently asked, “Is Neatso The Uber Of Home Cleaning?” MedCity News wonders about Capsule: “Is this the Uber of pharmacies?” A Quartz article proclaims: “UPS could soon become the ‘Uber’ of drone deliveries.” There’s also “the Uber of parking,” “the Uber of tutoring,” “the Uber of legal aid,” and “the Uber of the mattress industry.”
Other tech successes get in the game too, as it’s easy to find recent references to “the Facebook of cannabis,” “the Twitter of China,” “the Instagram of retail,” and “the iPhone of virtual reality.” When you’re trying to sell a product, there’s no easier shorthand than invoking another popular product, no matter how slim the connection. In tech and beyond, this adaptable idiom is the Cadillac of bullshit.
This construction — usually called “X is the Y of Z” — is a snowclone, a word lexicographers have used since 2004 for formulaic, meme-like expressions that resemble Mad Libs. The word snowclone (coined by economist Glen Whitman and spread by the Language Log blog) is inspired by the tendency of journalists to mindlessly repeat that old, incorrect chestnut about Eskimos and words for snow. After Whitman’s coinage, word mavens all over the internet began collecting these abundant, adaptable clichés, such as “X is the new Y,” “In space, no one can hear you X,” “Yes Virginia, there is an X,” “No one knows you’re an X on the internet,” and “If X is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”
“X is the Y of Z” is a more common and variable than those snowclones, making it hard to date. As Erin O’Connor wrote on the terrific Snowclone Database, “The metaphorical flexibility of this snowclone makes it much less idiomatically fixed than many of the others… which means you can’t trace it back to a comedian or movie from which all other usage was inspired. Metaphor is everywhere.”
In other words, the fossil record on this one is sketchy at best, unlike the snowclone inspired by Richard III’s exclamation, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.” Centuries later, people replace horse with defenseman, toilet, consultant, and spork, plus a lengthier gizmo in New Historian: “My Kingdom for a 3D Interactive Grave Site!” That extremely contemporary sentence wouldn’t be possible without Shakespeare’s 1592 play.
“X is the Y of Z” might be the most prolific and adaptable snowclone (as evidenced by the numerous examples I collected on The Rosa Parks of Blogs). In the international waters of the internet, I found examples such as “the Sharon Tate of dinner party hosts,” “the Lord Voldemort of policy questions,” “the Dwight Howard of the cow world,” “the Mick Jagger of scented candles,” and even “the Russ Meyer of the Rapture.” The flexibility of this snowclone allows any trait to become the hinge of a comparison. For examples, a 2015 Wired article describes the Motorola Droid Turbo 2 as “…the Kimmy Schmidt of phones,” praising its unbreakability.
While collecting such examples, I learned that damn near any person could find themselves in such a phrase, but one is more prolific than any other: Michael Jordan. Recent uses mention the Michael Jordan of machine learning, weightlifting, television network executives, aging, and the SEC. In a Vice article, Joel Golby went to the Jordan well and didn’t stop there, writing, : “…Kyle from Geordie Shore is exceptionally good at his job. He is the Michael Jordan of doing his job. He is the Lionel Messi of smelling like a cloud of velvet musk.”
It’s no wonder the tech world is enamored of snowclones, since they’re perfect for creating pithy blurbs designed to put new tech in our pockets while ferreting out our cash. Whether there’s any logic or sense to “the Uber of mattresses,” the term combines two things most people like, implying a chocolate-and-peanut-butter-type marriage. Just don’t get me started on that vague, always-on-the-way beast known as “the internet of things” — which sounds a little too much like the Borg of the apocalypse for my tastes.
