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By Mark Peters

Twitter is a joke factory, where professional comics and civilian jesters crank out one-liners round the clock.

In that joke factory, there are popular models. Every day, new jokes play on phrases such as “Dance like no one is watching,” “Sex is like pizza,” and “When life hands you lemons.” While the repetition can be maddening, I’m impressed by how, inevitably, there’s always another good joke lurking in even the most tired formula. “Give a man a fish” variations are endless, but there’s always a fresh catch, like this tweet by Erikka Innes:

Some formulas are seasonal. The arrival of 2013 brings variations of a formula I presume originated as a simple observation: “It’s X year, but I’m still writing X-1 year on my checks.” Some use the snowclone-like formula to point out its own exhaustion:

People write these kind of tweets about every joke formula, so I’d say pointing out hackiness has become its own form of hackery. Another option is using this format to comment on how checks have mostly gone the way of dinosaurs. This was a popular theme this year:

When jokesters move beyond the world of checks by replacing the word check, the humor gets more humorous:

Others keep the check part and replace 2012. In some cases, the subject matter stays close to the world of money, usually implying the tweeter is broke or a deadbeat:

Sometimes 2012 gets replaced with something a lot more creative:

A double replacement adds more possibilities:

And there’s plenty of room for absurd silliness, intriguing questions, and wordplay galore:

Love it or loathe it, this joke format will likely survive as long as we have years. Even in 3013, I bet we’ll still be writing “Please have sex with me” into the programming of our robots.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, and language columnist for Visual Thesaurus. He also writes Lost Batman Tales. Read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Ben Keene is the editor of Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his previous places of the week.

Arizona Strip

Coordinates: 36 50 N 113 0 W

Approximate area: 7,878 sq mi (20,404 sq km)

Last week I made my first visit to the Beehive State, or Utah as most of us know it, for some hiking, camping, and a bit of exploration via hybrid car. On Sunday, as I headed back to the airport, I decided to take a short detour to a region that the Bureau of Land Management includes “among the most remote and rugged public land in the lower 48 states.” Just over Arizona’s northern border, this two million acre swathe of sandstone mesas and ponderosa forest was covered in enough lush grass around the turn of the last century to support tens of thousands of cattle. Extensive logging and overgrazing reduced much of the land to desert scrub so while ranching persists here on the Arizona Strip, the number of animals isn’t nearly what it used to be. In fact, as I drove through the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation east of Fredonia, I saw little evidence of the human history that has unfolded here save for telephone poles, barbed wire fences, and rarely, a modest house.

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