The jackalope meme is in its nineties. The Kokopelli meme is over a thousand years old and has lately been rehydrated. Venus of Willendorf is around 25k years old. One can play this game for a long time.
Kilroy was here
Cats are fascinating because the best and the worst people in our lives could be described as cat like.
You know a cool cat. You also know a skittish cat.
Most animal connotations have a singular meaning, but cats, cats refuse to be boxed in.
> cats refuse to be boxed in
Cats sometimes refuse to be boxed in; other times an empty box is a cat's favorite plaything and habitat. Other times, the boxed-in cat is simultaneously alive and dead until the opening of the box. That's the beauty of cats: you just never know.
100? How about 150?
https://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/BTNPointerCats.htm
http://www.19thcenturyphotos.com/Henry-Pointer's-cats-124601...
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104XHB
Complete with meme captions.
For an older picture than those - here is a daguerreotype taken sometime between 1840 and 1860, 164 to 184 years ago.
https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/daguerreotypes-at-harvard/...
For an even earlier drawing of some big cats, see the Lascaux cave from arond 17,000 years ago.
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/explore-the-fresco-o...
The influence of 100-year-old viral memes can still be felt today. We use the terms "foo" and "bar" in programming as standardized nonce words or even variable names; "foo" in particular is traceable at least as far back as the 1930s comic Smokey Stover, whose author Bill Holman was fond of putting nonsensical words, puns, and sight gags in his comics. The main character was a goofy fireman who drove a tiny two-wheeled fire truck actually called the Foomobile. This comic kicked off a sort of foo-mania in popular culture, as exemplified by certain Warner Bros. cartoons, in which for instance Daffy Duck would hold up a sign reading "Silence Is Foo!" "Foo" was related to "phooey" and "faux pas" and carried similar connotations of silliness or stupidity; it would combine with WWII slang "FUBAR" to form "foobar".
I gave up attempting to grok the appeal of "foo" when I realized it was probably just a 1930s dank meme, and "you had to be there" to fully appreciate it. But recently we're seeing this whole process play out again so we can witness, as it happens, the rise of a new nonsense word into popular culture: "skibidi".
> The influence of 100-year-old viral memes can still be felt today. We use the terms "foo" and "bar"
I think the term "OK" is a better example.
Not even a little?
That's just the initials given in quality control, which more and more people began using as synonymous for having good quality. Which is pretty easy to understand: you keep seeing it on the well working cars. So it's an OK car...
Nothing about it had goofy/silly implications.
It also predates pretty much everyone on this forum (and the foobar term), so it wouldn't qualify for "you have to experience it for yourself"
No, OK is an abbreviation of "oll korrect", one example of a popular fad for cute misspellings... from the early 19th century.
Did you really believe that one person handled quality control for everything?
Recently President Biden broadcast a campaign ad where he begins with "Let's cut the malarkey", and I recognized that as a possibly Irish-adjacent neologism, so I looked it up, and apparently it was this guy: the great grand-daddy of all turn-of-the-century memes and coinages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tad_Dorgan
Foo, bar, baz, etc. are more metasyntactic variables than nonces.
https://jargon-i18n.com/en/M/metasyntactic-variable.html
I don't think they're related to FUBAR . . . that would be fugazi.
Nonsense pop terms are not this. They're slang. Blame (mostly) teenaged girls for that stuff, not elite (mostly male) engineers of yore.
From the same Jargon file: https://jargon-i18n.com/en/F/foobar.html#foobar
“It has been plausibly suggested that “foobar” spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because “foo bar” parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; […]”
With a small boost from Frank Zappa: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Q1yVLSR3I&si=Uw66ouRhkJI...
I don't know how a UK medium such as the BBC forgot to mention the now well-known Louis Wain (an English artist) [1][2]. I share the same surname with him but am not related. My uncle, an antiquarian, gave me an original postcard from him. Before that, I discovered him in a low-quality encyclopedia at a girlfriend's house, in an entry on schizophrenia [3].
[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10687506/
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Louis-Wain-Pictures-of-c...
I don't know why it's near universal. Ancient egypt had them. Japan loves them.
My stupid cat was acting crazy tonight and I was wondering: "How comes you still make me laugh you silly cat?". The thing was, as usual, attacking its rear legs and them legs were fighting back, going for the head.
I just opened the link to another frontpage article "The perils of transition to 64-bit time" and... Sure enough a cat picture greeted me.
I mean... It never gets old.
Didn't Ancient Egypt basically build a civilization and cult of worship based entirely on cat memes, with a particular monument to prove it?
Linguistic note: neither "meme" (in the modern sense, not the Dawkins sense) nor "going viral" existed 20 years ago, let alone 100 years. The nature of how culture spread makes both words wildly inapplicable, even if the underlying idea is somewhat similar.
This is completely false.
Meme even in the modern internet sense, was used in the 90's, here's Memepool from 1998:
If you look at the first captures (https://web.archive.org/web/19981205011851/http://www.memepo...), this is not the modern sense of the term “meme” as “funny picture/running gag”. Memes in the modern sense of course already existed much earlier, but usage of the term “meme” in that sense only developed later, sometime in the 2000s. At least that’s how I remember it.
"Going viral" probably existed 20 years ago, though perhaps barely. I don't have access to the OED but several web sources say OED's earliest recorded usage was from 2004.
Here's a Wired article dated January 1, 2005 featuring the term "viral video" as something that doesn't need to be explained: https://www.wired.com/2005/01/check-out-this-video-clip/
So yes, we can be certain that "going viral" existed 20 years ago, to the extent that we think "viral" is the status achieved by "viral videos".
I don't remember any instances of the term "going viral", but "meme" was definitely around 20 years ago. 4chan launched in 2003.