"In an entertaining piece on shelter magazines in the March 2006 Atlantic Monthly ( "Home Alone: The dark heart of shelter-lit addiction"), Terry Castle reports (on p. 122) that
If you enter the words "not your mother's" on Google, you'll get nearly 200,000 results, a huge number of which point you immediately toward shelter-mag articles. "Not your mother's [whatever]" turns out to be an established interiors trope, endlessly recycled in titles, pull quotes, advertisements, photo captions, and the like. "Not Your Mother's Tableware" is a typical heading--meant presumably to assure you that if you acquire the featured cutlery you will also, metaphorically speaking, be giving your mom the finger.
Castle is exploring the message of the shelter magazines that you can free yourself from your mother's influence and make "your own space". Along the way she has stumbled upon a snowclone that we haven't discussed here: "not your R's X" (where R is a kin term) conveying that this X is new, unprecedented, improved, superior, unconventional, etc.
link to blog entry | Language Log
>related Language Log's search results for snowclone
Posted by Cieciel at February 21, 2006 06:46 AM