On the basis of data from the Russian National Corpus, we analyze the meanings and structure of the syntactic construction observed in phrases like durak durakom ‘fool-nom.sg fool-ins.sg’, which we term the ‘NOM∼INS construction’. We argue that the construction constitutes a network of three closely related subcategories, which we refer to as ‘Extreme’, ‘Paragon’ and ‘Discourse Change’. It is furthermore shown that a diachronic change has taken place, whereby Discourse Change has overtaken Extreme as the dominant subcategory. Our analysis provides ample evidence for the main tenets of Construction Grammar, namely that a language is a network of related constructions, that meaning is often not compositional, that there is a continuum from idiomatic to schematic uses of constructions, and that constructions evolve over time.