“Let your X do the Y”
Real estate signs are a great source of “copy in the wild”. This one caught my eye, but not for the right reasons. At the bottom right of the sign is a small ad encouraging viewers to list their houses on the company’s website: “Register at hockingstuart.com.au and let the house do the hunting.” (It’s a bit difficult to read on this picture, but trust me, that’s what it says!)
This is a pretty obvious homage to an old classic, “Let your fingers do the walking”. Advertising Age gives the latter slogan, used internationally for many years by Yellow Pages, an honourable mention in its list of the Top 10 Slogans of the [20th] Century. So famous was it that it became what the linguists at Language Log call a snowclone: a phrase with one or more substitutable words that becomes a kind of cliché generator, a template for new phrases, like “X is the new Y”, or “the mother of all X”, or (for the geeks among us) “I’m in ur X, Y-ing ur Z”. A quick Google search for “Let your X do the Y” comes up with “Let your thumbs do the trading” (about using a mobile phone to play the stock market), “Let your feet do the talking” (about an awareness-raising sponsored walk), and “Let your subconscious do the thinking” (about…well, I guess that one’s fairly obvious). “Let the house do the hunting” changes the template slightly by using “the” instead of “your”, but it’s still a very clear nod.
