• papalonian@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    10 days ago

    It’s mostly prevalent in the ironic meme community.

    Basically, in the early days of memery, these “top text / bottom text” images were like 75% of memes. A lot of online editors were rather primitive when it came to spacing, font size, etc., which led to a lot of manual rearranging of words and text.

    For example, you may have originally typed, “my face when / the teacher calls on me”, but decided the spacing wasn’t right, so meant to change it to “my face when the / teacher calls on me” , but forgot to delete the “the” in the second line.

    This incredibly common typo became a kind of hallmark of “bad memes”, and has been intentionally replicated in shit posting communities as a sort of wink saying “this is bad on purpose”.

    All this to say, I’m not positive if this is a case of an actual typo, or an ironic replication. The meme seems otherwise genuine, so I’m leaning towards the former.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 days ago

      Inb4 your comment is cited by some anthropologist in a research paper on meme history centuries from now.

    • Carnelian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 days ago

      That all makes a ton of sense, thank you. Yeah I figured it had to be some type of stylistic nod but that’s funny it originated from organic typos which continue to happen