It's Meme Time

     Memes are one thing that I go searching for every day. Most everyone knows what a meme is, but for those who are new here. A meme is an element of culture that is passed from one person to another by nongenetic means. Also, it is a funny image, video, or text that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users. Because most memes are both image and text-based, they can show emotion or information with just a picture.

     Here, I am going to talk about some of my favorite memes and give some information about them. These will be the "Is this a?" meme, the woman yelling at a cat, OK Boomer, and Lenny.

"Is this a pigeon?"

    

      The point of this meme is that an oblivious guy mistakes one thing for another. It comes from a 1991 anime called Brave of the Sun Fighbird, and this guy is Katori Yutaro. This whole scene is supposed to be funny, as Katori is an android that has just settled on the planet. 

     He, especially in this scene and another that became a meme as well, was comical. He was identifying things incorrectly and making incorrect statements. The meme officially surfaced in 2011 and was originally posted with its original caption.

Taylor Armstrong and Smudge

     So this meme, known as "woman yelling at cat meme", is made up of two separate pictures. The first being a screenshot from the reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, showing Taylor Armstrong yelling and pointing while co-star Kyle Richards holds her back. The second image being of a white cat looking confused while sitting at a table. This cat is known as Smudge, and has his own round of memes that circle, showing him acting like, what his owner says, "a goblin."

Surprised Pikachu

     Surprised Pikachu, like most other memes, is made of content from another source. This image comes from the anime Pokemon, specifically from Season 1 Episode 10 "Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village."

     Shown above is the first use of the meme, from a Tumblr user in 2018. Explaining this scenario that most of us have probably found ourselves in, through the use of a meme. Within about 2 weeks, the meme had made its way to various other sharing sites, and hundreds of thousands of reposts and shares. 

     There was a point in time where people were posting the original Surprised Pikachu picture on Twitter without making it into a meme, only to have their accounts locked due to "gore." Rightfully so, people were really confused and tried it themselves and posted their experiences on other sites and other Twitter accounts, to eventually have this problem fixed around March of 2019.

OK Boomer

     OK, Boomer. By this point, I am willing to bet that just about everyone and their mother has heard about "OK Boomer." Apparently, the actual origin of this meme is currently unknown, but it can be traced back to at least 2015 when a Reddit user posted "lol okay boomer :)."

The phrase made its way to Twitter by 2018, gaining traction there. The meme started becoming more popular and widespread in January of 2019. And closer to the end of Summer, beginning of Autumn 2019, it became popular on TikTok. This made it spread much more rapidly.

Lenny

     Lenny is an emoticon made with Unicode and keyboard characters. It was originally used to spam forums and Reddit posts. The earliest use of Lenny that can be found is on a Finnish 4Chan in which they asked the question of what administrators should do to filter their spam. Someone then complained about seeing this on multiple posts, and other users began bogging down the thread by posting variations of the emoticon with different types of eyes, which went on for three days.

     All on the same day, the emoticon was posted on so many 4Chan boards (/v/, /s/, etc) that users were being immediately banned for posting it. 

Derivative: ( ‾ʖ̫‾)

Above is a variation of Lenny that was posted in 2013.

DegDeg

Lenny can also be called DegDeg, because of the Tumblr post about someone whose laptop read the emoticon out loud as "degdeg." 

I haven't seen anyone say it, but I can only assume that the laptop read it out like that due to the fact that Lenny's face is made with two "degree" symbols from the keyboard, and so it probably read out the degree symbols within the parentheses.