important terms and definitions pertaining to internet memes which will be necessary for clarity going

forward.
A Meme Glossary
• Copypasta: slang for “copy-paste,” copypasta refers to any block of text that gets copied and
pasted over and over again online. It would include, but not be limited to, chain letters spread
online. I would consider copypasta an example of “true” replication as defined by Sperber and
Kronfeldner – the text is not merely reconstructed, but faithfully copied. According to Know
Your Meme, the term copypasta is thought to have originated around 2006 from the Anon
community on the message-board site 4chan. In September 2006, the parody-style wiki
Encyclopedia Dramatica published an entry on “copypasta.”113 Creepypasta is a genre of
copypasta that focuses on horror or unsettling stories and urban legands.114
• Dank memes: these are difficult to define. The term refers to viral media, in-jokes, and other
internet memes that have either become over-used clichés or are intentionally bizarre, and are
in either situation therefore humorous. Usage of the word “dank” originated as a slang term
for high quality marijuana, and the application to internet memes is synonymous with “cool,”
but with ironic or satirical intent.115
• Emoticons: Pictorial versions of facial expressions created through punctuation marks and
letters, the smiley emoticon “:)” the most ubiquitous. Originated as ASCII art, they are
intended to disambiguate the tone of online conversation by indicating emotion.116
• Emoji: The successor to emoticons. Unlike emoticons which are simply representational
marks, emoji are graphical images of facial expressions (like this 😊, compared to the smiley
in the above definition of emoticons), symbols, or objects and intended to convey emotions
or phrases in SMS and instant messaging.117

113
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Copypasta,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/copypasta.
114
Jessica Roy, “Inside Creepypasta, the Internet Trend That Allegedly Spawned a Killer Meme,” Time, June 3, 2014,
http://time.com/2818192/creepypasta-copypasta-slender-man/.
115
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Dank Memes,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dank-memes; Annaliese Griffin, “‘Dank’ Is the New Umami,” Quartzy, March 9,
2018, https://qz.com/quartzy/1221995/dank-is-the-new-umami/; “Dank Meme - What Does Dank Meme Mean?,”
Everything After Z by Dictionary.Com (blog), accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/dank-
meme/; Ashley Hoffman, “Donald Trump Jr. Just Became a Dank Meme, Literally,” Time, February 2, 2018,
http://time.com/5130384/donald-trump-jr-dankness-tweet/.
116
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Emoticons,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 28, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/emoticons; Megan Garber, “Today, the Emoticon Turns 30 :-),” The Atlantic,
September 19, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/today-the-emoticon-turns-30/262571/.
ASCII, a character encoding standard, stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and ASCII art
is artistic works produced using ASCII symbols and characters.
117
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Emoji,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 28, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/emoji; Arielle Pardes, “The Complete History of Emoji,” Wired, February 1, 2018,
https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/.
28
 • GIF or gif: pronounced variously as “jif” or “gif,” a gif is a file format and standard set for
storing color images and short animations. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is
used both as a verb and verb.118
• Hashtag: a word, acronym, or unspaced phrase preceded by a hash mark – #, also known as
the number or pound sign. It originated on Twitter in 2007 after it was suggested as a metadata
tag by the open source software advocate Chris Messina.119
• Image Macro: images captioned with a short message or catchphrase. In my experience, both
from observation and my own word usage, image macros are often incorrectly referred to as
“memes.” The term is attributed to the forum Something Awful in 2004, with a definition of
it provided by the user Eclipse on February 12 of that year. 120 Image Macros most often use
the Impact Font – this particular font became a meme (in the classic sense of the term) largely
because of its widespread distribution across word processors and other software in the 1990s
and because it contrasts well with an underlying image regardless of that image’s color
scheme.121 LOLcats are a genre of Image Macro, usually of humorous intent, that consist of
cat photos superimposed with text in English that is broken, misspelled, or both – a dialect
called “lolspeak.”122 Lolspeak also “includes unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and queer
word reduplication (fastfastfast).”123
• Engrish: internet slang to describe English texts translated from East Asian languages such as
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that are grammatically broken or esoteric after translation.

118
“Gif,” Dictionary.com, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gif; Alison Flood, “Gif Is
America’s Word of the Year? Now That’s What I Call an Omnishambles,” The Guardian, November 14, 2012, sec.
Books, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/nov/14/gif-america-word-year-omnishambles.
119
“Definition of HASHTAG,” Merriam-Webster, accessed April 28, 2019, https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/hashtag; Angela Watercutter and Emma Grey Ellis, “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know
About Memes,” Wired, April 1, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/guide-memes/; Ashley Parker, “Hashtags, a New
Way for Tweets: Cultural Studies,” The New York Times, June 10, 2011, sec. Fashion & Style,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/fashion/hashtags-a-new-way-for-tweets-cultural-studies.html; Chris Messina,
“How Do You Feel about Using # (Pound) for Groups. As in #barcamp [Msg]?,” Tweet, @chrismessina (blog), August
23, 2007, https://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412.
120
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Image Macros,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/image-macros.
121
Phil Edwards, “The Reason Every Meme Uses That One Font,” Vox, July 26, 2015,
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/26/9036993/meme-font-impact.
122
Know Your Meme Contributors, “LOLcats,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 24, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lolcats; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Image Macros”; Aaron Rutkoff, “With
‘LOLcats’ Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2007,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118798557326508182; Bisera Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Elena Shalevska,
“Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics
Studies 2, no. 4 (November 20, 2018): 165–66.
123
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska, “Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features,” 166.
29
 Although the term originated as Internet humor, it describes texts which are both online and
offline.124
• Memeing (or meming): the term “meme” used as a present participle or gerund. The first
known use was on May 3, 1996, in an online article by Matthew Aaron Taylor.125
• Meme Lord or Meme Master: internet slang term referring to someone with a strong passion
for internet memes. First known use was by the blogger Duffergeek on March 2, 2006.126
• Meme Magic: a hypothesized sorcerous or voodoo power of certain internet memes which
can transcend the virtual world and result in actual world consequences. The earliest uses of
the term in an occult sense, rather than simply to the spreading capacity of internet memes,
are traced to March 2015, when several online communities started identifying parallels
between the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 and the plane scene in the movie The Dark
Knight Rises.127 This occult power of internet memes may stem from occult memetics, a
hypothesis that memetics can help occultists wield magical power.128
• Single-serving site: websites with a single page and dedicated domain name, with only a single
purpose. The earliest known example was Purple.com, launched in 1994, whose sole content
was a purple background (the website is now owned by a mattress company).129
• Snowclones: These are a type of phrasal template – phrase-long juxtapositions of words with
blank spaces which can be filled in. They typically are quotes from items of pop culture with
one or more words replaced to alter the meaning. For example, the phrase “I’m not a doctor,
but I play one on TV” – a line from numerous commercials in the 1980s – becomes “I'm not

124
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Engrish,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/engrish.
125
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Memeing,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/memeing; Matthew Aaron Taylor, “Fiction, AL, and the Memeing of Life,”
Telepolis, March 5, 1996, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Fiction-AL-and-the-Memeing-of-Life-3445807.html.
126
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Meme Lord / Meme Master,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-lord-meme-master.
127
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Meme Magic,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic; Paul Spencer, “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme
Magic’ Got Him Elected,” Motherboard (blog), November 18, 2016,
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgkx7g/trumps-occult-online-supporters-believe-pepe-meme-magic-got-
him-elected.
128
Spencer, “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme Magic’ Got Him Elected”; Tarl Warwick, Occult
Memetics: Reality Manipulation (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016); R. Kirk
Packwood, Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality (Seattle Washington:
Jaguar Temple Press, 2004). I am not sure whether this parallel between the "Meme Magic" term and the occult
memetics hypothesis is intentional or co-incidental. Perhaps it is both.
129
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Single-Serving Site,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/single-serving-site.
30
 a(n) [insert profession], but I play one on TV.” The term was coined by the linguist Geoffrey
K. Pullum and economist Glen Whitman in the mid-2000s.130
• Troll and trolling: Trolls and trolling refer to individuals and behavior, typically manifested
online, that are intentionally disruptive, disparaging, inflammatory, antagonistic, or irrelevant,
for the sake of sowing discord or as a form of harassment.131
• Viral video or viral media: Media which metaphorically goes “viral.” This term traces back
to the “thought viruses” idea in memetics and references media, typically a video, that spreads
particularly rapidly on the internet. The exact criteria for determining whether or not content
has become popular enough and fast enough to be considered viral is not clear. However, it
typically infers at least a million views, often several million.132

Section 2: Examples of Internet Memes

Of course, as internet memes likely number in the millions, to provide even a fractional
overview of them is impossible. Rather, in this section, I provide examples of some popular internet
memes, in roughly chronological order, in order to illustrate their cultural impact and thus possible
need for preservation.
Internet memes go back as far as the origins of the internet itself, with many, if not most, of
the earliest versions falling under the classic definition of meme – they were directly imitated. One
of the earliest well-documented and highly popular memes was the use of emoticons, especially the
smiley – “:)” or “:-)” – and sad face – “:(” or “:-(”. Origination of this meme is attributed to a proposal
made by Scott Fahlman on September 19, 1982 at 11:44 am (DST) on a message board for the

130
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Snowclone,” Know Your Meme, accessed April 18, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/snowclone; Geoffrey Pullum, “Language Log: Snowclones: Lexicographical
Dating to the Second,” Language Log (blog), January 16, 2004,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html; Glen Whitman, “Phrases for Lazy Writers in Kit
Form Are the New Clichés,” Agoraphilia: The Center for Blurbs in the Public Interest (blog), December 6, 2005,
http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2004/01/phrases-for-lazy-writers-in-kit-form.html; Arnold Zwicky, “Language Log:
Playing One 3,” Language Log (blog), October 16, 2005,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002550.html; Paul McFedries, “Snowclone Is The New Cliché,”
IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, February 1, 2008, https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-
work/education/snowclone-is-the-new-clich.
131
James Hanson, “Trolls and Their Impact on Social Media,” James Hanson (blog), accessed May 10, 2019,
https://unlcms.unl.edu/engineering/james-hanson/trolls-and-their-impact-social-media; “Troll Definition and Meaning,”
Collins English Dictionary, accessed May 10, 2019, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/troll;
“Definition of TROLL,” Merriam-Webster, accessed May 10, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/troll;
“Troll,” Oxford Dictionaries | English, accessed May 10, 2019, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/troll;
“Trolling,” Cambridge English Dictionary, accessed May 10, 2019,
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/trolling.
132
Solon, “Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word ‘Meme’”; Elise Moreau, “What Does Going Viral
Online Really Mean?,” Lifewire, November 16, 2018, https://www.lifewire.com/what-does-it-mean-to-go-viral-
3486225; Megan O’Neill, “What Makes A Video ‘Viral’?,” May 9, 2011, https://www.adweek.com/digital/what-
makes-a-video-viral/; “What Is a Viral Video? - Definition from Techopedia,” Techopedia.com, accessed April 24,
2019, https://www.techopedia.com/definition/26863/viral-video.
31