Ben Zimmer published a brilliant collection of internet memes from the past twenty years in a the journal American Speech. Memes like facepalming and the O, rly? owl have allowed us to communicate otherwise unwritable sentiments via the internet. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Internet Meme Lexicon”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
Martha, by 1992, I was on the Internet. Where were you?
I was on the Internet, too.
It was great, right?
Oh, it was fun.
Do you realize we’ve now been on the Internet for 20 years or more than that?
Oh, my gosh.
I mean, and before that was the bulletin board systems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I was reminded recently by something I read, and I’ll share this with you in a minute, that the Internet culture has become so pervasive, it’s like expecting electricity in your house.
Yeah.
150 years ago, you didn’t automatically get electricity in your house.
Oh, yeah.
20 years ago, you didn’t automatically have internet anywhere.
Right.
Well, people thought you were weird, you know. They would communicate with people all over the country. You’d never seen them. You didn’t have images of them. You’d have to call the front desk and ask if it was okay to plug your modem into the hotel phone, right?
Yeah.
Well, there was a great article written by Ben Zimmer in the Journal American Speech. He has collected and defined and done some history on internet memes.
Internet memes are these ideas, usually a little jokey, that pass from person to person, and they kind of express emotions and sentiments that are otherwise hard to relate online.
We’ve talked about this before. They’re like emoticons that give us paralinguistic restitution. You are restoring to the written online language what is easy to do aloud with our ears and our eyes and our hands and our faces.
You can kind of incorporate what you get from gestures into these images that get passed around.
For example, if someone says something unbelievable, you might post what’s called an image macro of a snowy white owl with this text that says, oh, really? And it’s spelled in an internet way, O-R-L-Y?
So you’re expressing your skepticism and the expression that would be on your face if they could see you.
That’s right. But at the same time, because it’s a little jokey and it’s expressed in this lower register of written language, you are letting the person know that you’re not accusing them of great malfeasance.
It’s just a little bit like, I doubt you. It’s not serious. Let’s still be friends. But will you explain yourself? Right.
And there’s a lot of Internet culture and a lot of Internet language that is like this.
It’s our struggle as basically an offline species to make ourselves understood online.
And so I’m going to share this article with our listeners where all of these great terms have been explained.
Not everything that we ever used online, but the big boys, the ones that are more common and have some kind of life in them.
It’s just wonderful stuff.
It’s a great article, like face palm, I love.
Yeah.
Head desk.
Head desk, right?
When somebody does something unbelievable, you have to slam your head on the desk and go, oh, my God, I can’t believe you did that.
Head desk.
