  A snowclone is a customizable phrasal template that can be realized in
multiple, instantly recognized variants. For example, ``* is the new *" (Orange
is the new black, 40 is the new 30). Snowclones are extensively used in social
media. In this paper, we study snowclones originating from pop-culture quotes;
our goal is to automatically detect cultural references in text. We introduce a
new, publicly available data set of pop-culture quotes and their corresponding
snowclone usages and train models on them. We publish code for Catchphrase, an
internet browser plugin to automatically detect and mark references in
real-time, and examine its performance via a user study. Aside from assisting
people to better comprehend cultural references, we hope that detecting
snowclones can complement work on paraphrasing and help to tackle long-standing
questions in social science about the dynamics of information propagation.
