What’s a snowclone?
In 2004, economics professor and TV writer Glen Whitman coined a word to end all words. . . er . . . to describe worn-out and cliche yet handily recognizable plug-and-play phrasal templates.
“…a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers… Pullum offers the frequent use of the old saw about Eskimos having some really large number of words for snow (which turns out to be false) in sentences like, “If Eskimos have N words for snow, then Santa Cruzans must have even more for surf.”