what is a snowclone?

... I don't hear you ask. Well I'm going to tell you anyway.

A snowclone is a particular kind of cliché: one where's there's a given linguistic template that can be endlessly adapted to the writer's (or speaker's) ends. For instance, "This is your brain on X"; "X is the new Y"; "The X formerly known as X"; "Channeling her inner X"... etc. (The name comes from “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z”, a bugbear of the linguist who coined the term, Geoffrey Pullum.)

And guess what? There's a whole website devoted to snowclones, ready for you to explore. Snowclones are the new memes. Or something.