Geoff Pullum has been writing some interesting things about cliches over at Language Log (see here and here). The phenomenon in question is specifically the case of cliches that exist as templates, i.e. "an X shade of Y" or "X is the new Y". These can be easily recycled to fit whatever an author is writing about. Semantic Compositions would like to offer:
it's not the X, it's the Y
A search on Google turns up some 297,000 instances of this template, including:
"it's not the oil, it's the art"
"it's not the price, it's the value"
"it's not the carbs, it's the calories"
Prof. Pullum credits Glen Whitman with the term "snowclones" to describe these, after the template "if Eskimos have N words for snow, then X has even more for Y". SC hereby encourages readers to send further examples to Profs. Pullum or Whitman, who definitely own this topic.
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