A bit of early
morning afternoon
Language Log style research before I start searching for phonetic justification for feature incompatability in high glides.
The question: is "our/the last best hope for X" a
snowclone?
It's certainly a good candidate. It feels good to say (probably due to the internal rhyme of
last and
best as well as various prosodic features) and it's easy to switch out the original "peace" for whatever noun or noun phrase you fancy.
But just because something can be a snowclone doesn't mean it is. The esteemed professor Zwicky points out
here and
here that there is a difference between a true snowclone and a clever play on a catch phrase. Real snowclones have a clear variable (and usually only one or two -- you can't just swap out anything you like) and to the extent that the template carries meaning it's consistent across all variables (Zwicky talks about how that's not true of
Brokeback Mountain based "snowclones"
here).
"The last best hope for X" seems to meet those requirements, though it doesn't appear on Wikipedia's
list of snowclones. But how widely is it attested? Enter google, stage right. A quick search for ["last best hope for" -peace] turned up 60,700 results. Promising.
And the numbers seem to back it up: I went through the first 50 hits, and only one wasn't a valid option. Our/the/a alternated pretty freely as determiners. There were some repeats, but there were 33 distinct tokens for the variable. Most of them were short nouns or noun phrases:
prosperity, clean code, religious continuity, america, gray davis, congress, geek(s), social capital, ending corruption, software reuse, inner cities, licensed wireless broadband, fan clubs, galactic domination, cryptoanarchy, the republican party, anti-gun legislation, dinner, drink, netware, earth, retirement savings, literature, a neglected BBC, school choice, africa, victory, educators.There were a few longer substitutions:
"information and links on sci-fi movies, tv,games, and computers!" (from ourlastbesthope.com); NE Philadelphia Great Grandfather with Life-Threatening Aortic Aneurysm; staving off the prairie fire of '06.And even one instance of "the last best hope for what?"
It seems pretty clear that this meets at least one of the requirements for snowclone status -- the substitutions fit a pretty clear pattern. When I googled ["last best * for peace" -hope], google told me there were 9,600 results but would only show me 6 of them. Only one of those was noteworthy, and that was a substitution of "chance," which is for all intents and purposes the same thing as "hope."
The meaning of the template stays pretty consistent, too. I only really saw two different intentions, which essentially boiled down to the interpretation of the prepositional phrase. One interpretation was something like "the last best hope for attaining X" (ie, prosperity or galactic domination) and the other was something like "the last best hope for rescuing X" (ie, inner cities or america). Some were pretty ambiguous between the two (school choice? religious continuity?) and I didn't bother to investigate further to see which of the possible interpretations was intended.
So "last best hope for X" meets two of the core requirements for being a snowclone. Done and done, right? maybe. I'm not necessarily convinced. The question is whether "last best hope" is an unusual enough construction to merit snowclone status.
Somethings are just bound to be said over and over again as templates with a variable. "Can you hand me the X?" doesn't quite count as a snowclone, and it's possible that "last best hope" might not either for the same reason. But it seems to make a pretty convincing case for itself -- first of all, many of the examples I found in my google search were from journalistic sources. I have no hard evidence for this, but journalists sure do love to use things like cliches and snowclones to make stupid article titles. Second, it probably isn't as common as it seems, or at least not as common as it would be if it hadn't been snowcloned.
One last point:
Babylon 5 didn't do it first, and "peace" is not the original X. The
locus classicus seems to be Ronald Reagan's 1983 speech to the National Rifle Association, in which he said "the United States remains the last best hope for a mankind plagued by tyranny and deprivation." The pilot movie of
Babylon 5 didn't air until 1993, and the series didn't begin until 1994. I haven't been able to find a reference from before 1983.
