Set Phasers on Tweet: A Star Trek Snowclone Blizzard on Twitter

Right now, I kind of feel like I’m cheating on my wife…with my wife. Or at least her twin sister.

You see, I should be re-re-revising a project on TV words, a project that seems to have more lives than a zombie-vampire cat. That is the project I should certainly be working on right now, this very instant, in fact. Instead, I find myself writing this blog post on a TV-word-related topic: the Star Trek snowclone “set phasers on X.”

While searching for examples of this adaptable phrase on Twitter, I was aware that the phasers snowclone tended to include variations on stun like stunning and stunned, plus unpredictable one-word substitutions likeennui, spoil, and vaporize. But I was completely unprepared for some wild variations—especially, “Set nerdy-comedian fantasy phasers to ‘uhhhh take me now.’”—and I was generally surprised at how mega-fun this snowclone is, so much funner than my monkey brain could have guessed, and definitely way, way funner than working on my revisions like a good boy. If I had a phaser, iPhone, or robot butler with settings like sexytimeor discombobulate (see below), they’d probably have to lock me up in an undisclosed location and intensely interrogate me until I got back to work on those revisions.

So please join me in my procrastination and enjoy these recent Twitter examples of a prolific snowclone, in the spirit of recent posts on Twitteration and Trekitude. By the way, since I totally love the new Star Trek movie, and I dearly love Twitter, and I fiercely love snowclones, I don’t know how I could enjoy writing this post more, unless puppies, a chocolate-coated robot butler, a Three Floyd’s Dark Floyd Russian imperial stout, or a magical conclusion to my revisions were involved. If you can supply any of the above, CALL ME.

http://blog.oup.com/2009/06/set-phasers-on-tweet-a-star-trek-snowclone-blizzard-on-twitter/