“Manual user interfaces? We don’t need no stinkin’ manual user interfaces!”

This could be the new tagline for Project54 (which introduces speech user interfaces in police cruisers), if we followed the cliché popularized by the Mel Brooks movie, Blazing Saddles: “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” In fact there’s a simple formula we can follow to create a new cliché from the Blazing Saddles line: “X? We don’t need no stinkin’ X!”

As it turns out, there’s a name for such formulaic clichés: they’re called snowclones. The term was introduced by Glen Whitman on his blog Agoraphilia (here is the link to the post). I read about it in the February 2008 issue of Spectrum, in which Paul McFedries gives several good snowclone examples (link). And to make it clear that this term is for real, it has its own Wikipedia entry.

So, now we know how the time-honored engineering cliché “Manual? We don’t need no stinkin’ manual!” came about.

Andrew Kun

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