Noncompositional

A particular snowclone got my attention a few months ago, so I thought I might as well make public note of it. There are two basic forms that I’ve noticed:

• A play X to B’s Y
• A be X to B’s Y

Examples of the first are, I suspect, rather old, dating back at least as far as to whenever people talked about operating musical instruments or playing dramatic roles “towards” another such performer. The more mundane of these are like this example: a woman plays the bass lines to my guitar riffs… and vice versa. They get more fun when you have metaphoric uses of this same construction. This metaphoric use is also quite old, I think (see examples at the end of the post), but some more modern uses might be called for:

For now it’s winter and the building plays the perfect backdrop to my homage to the tree in this city. All the same, I have the same crippling burden of knowlege and ego to go with it, and scripture constantly plays the hammer to my self-loving nail. So I went home to ask my roommate, he’d know. The poor guy plays the Felix to my Oscar, and OUR show gets weirder each season.

Particularly in the second two examples, what this construction lets you do is give roles to two entities, and then the names of the roles evoke a larger situation where the roles interact in commonly understood ways. Hammer on nail, Felix on Oscar, and so on. (The first example is a more straightforward extension, not relying on any additional cultural frames aside from just “having special roles to be (metaphorically) played out.)

Things get much more interesting when you get rid of play and just allow be. Examples:

He’s the Riker to my Picard. My right-hand man. I don’t know what I would do without her! She is like the cheese to my crackers, the apple to my cider. the fizzle with the minizzle [Y]ou are the sun to my moon I found it hard to relate to Jen in some ways, since I am the ant to her grasshopper, however I really enjoyed her witty [and] irreverent style & whipped through this book in short order. I am the navigator to her pilot, the architect to her engineer. While we may have many, many similarities, both corporeal and metaphysical, our magics are only alike in their strength. Thanks for the restatement [...] I think I’m [the] apple to your orange. I read your later post and was citing the VDH quote in that. I agree with your restatement. Youre the KIT to my KAT. / Youre the TOOTSIE to my ROLL. / Youre the CHAI to my TEA your the DIET to my COKE, / your the SUN to my VALLEY! / your the MY to my SPACE!!!!!! Writing and reading are what I live for. They are the core of my existence, the lights of my life, the Tom to my Cruise, the white to my rice and the Harry to my Potter.

Let’s call the basic schema “A be the X to B’s Y”. In some cases, X and Y are roles that commonly appear together. For instance, Riker and Picard, or cheese and crackers (and possibly ants and grasshoppers…sort of a master/apprentice thing? I’m not sure here). These have conventional relationships to each other, by virtue of often appearing together. In some cases, X and Y are commonly juxtaposed items, but are opposites, or not often seen together. This is the case for being the sun to someone’s moon. A related case would be being the apple to someone’s orange. This obviously builds off the idea of talking about comparing apples to oranges, two similar, but crucially-different things.

Once you get into this sort of meta-linguistic use, the floodgates swing open. Being the kit to someone’s kat, or the Harry to someone’s Potter are not about two complementary roles, but about two inseparable parts of the same entity, or at least about being two things that are so closely bound up that they may as well be the same thing (like, ahem, a very loving couple). And indeed, as you can probably tell, this sort of use is common in romantic compositions, or in the last example, in describing things that you cannot live, or imagine living, without.

I haven’t yet found any cases of sub-morpheme parts being used (like the cali to my fornia), but if multi-word expressions are fair game, I don’t see why someone couldn’t be clever enough to do it. (Of course, it’s more likely that it happens but that I haven’t found it. You try searching for some!)

And, as promised, some older equivalents with play:

I cannot, while he stands full in the sun, A child for hopefulness, a man for strength, I cannot play the tempest to his joy, And smite him to the earth. Who comes? Forbid! Not thou to say ’tis he. –Vivia Perpetua (1841) One’s little learning rusts With the disuse of life; whereas this man Has annalists and poets of all time For comrades and familiars of his leisure, Yet girds a leathern apron round his loins To play the farrier to my helplessness. … Where is the stable? –Fortunatus the pessimist (1892) Aye, Bayard—well remembered; Mistake me not—I would not play the traitor To my great benefactor, for the worth Of woman-kind. –The Prophet of St. Paul’s (1836) Thunder strike thee Dead for this Deceit, immediate [600] Lightning blast thee, me and the whole World— Oh! I could rack my self, play the Vulture to my own Heart, and gnaw it piece-meal, for not boding to me this misfortune. –The double dealer (1694) If you had not an Extraordinary value for her you would not play the Knight-Errant to my Knowledge; Is not this dissimulation of yours very ridiculous. –The sullen lovers (1668)