When you read phrases like these in a newspaper, you've stumbled across a particular type of cliché: the snowclone.

I know you're surprised that I live in a Czech neighborhood. But my father-in-law, a smart old Jew, bought investment property in this nice safe Bohunk district.

Highly providential was the appearance on the scene of Corny Kelleher when Stephen was blissfully unconscious but for that man in the gap turning up at the eleventh hour the finish might have been that he might have been a candidate for the accident ward […]

After being shipwrecked on the island, we were in dire straits.