• Carnelian@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I’ve actually noticed this is a pervasive trend with top/bottom text memes. Where the final word of the top line is repeated as the first word of the bottom line. I’ve been curious about where it comes from but have no idea what to search or who to ask

    • papalonian@lemmy.world
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      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
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        10 days ago

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

      • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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        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