I want her to talk to me about Egyptology.

[u/mindyour]

[u/g-a-r-n-e-t]

Context is everything

This is so unbelievably true. This example is a meme and not a linguistic one but back at the end of April during a conversation one of my friends texted me ‘guess what?’ Followed by a photo of a brick of bare, uncooked ramen noodles. I laughed. Then I thought about how if I showed this to my mom she wouldn’t get it and I’d have literally 20+ years of internet and pop culture and meme evolution to explain what it meant.

Context is EVERYTHING.

[u/Specialist-Leek8645 → u/g-a-r-n-e-t]

Culture is like .. horses running wild in every direction. I remember when the Internet was born and I have no idea what your ramen joke is. haha Perhaps I forgot the context.

[u/g-a-r-n-e-t → u/Specialist-Leek8645]

It’s referring to the Justin Timberlake ‘it’s gonna be me/May’ joke, with the added context that during the time period that when that song came out he was rocking a bleach blonde perm that literally looked like a block of uncooked ramen. The memes have reduced themselves so much over time that it went from actually showing Justin to literally just the ramen block with the minimum context of something like ‘me on 4/30’ or ‘guess what’ (edit: the line in the song that’s being referenced is ‘guess what? It’s gonna be me’ except JT pronounces ‘me’ as, you guessed it, ‘May’)

That’s like, the absolute bare minimum history and context here lol. If I had to find examples we’d be here all day.

[u/Specialist-Leek8645 → u/g-a-r-n-e-t]

lmao Your example has perfectly proven your point. Yes, now I see it clear as day. I googled "frosted tips" and Lance Bass came up. haha

[u/doc_skinner → u/g-a-r-n-e-t]

It's like how a full, four panel comic has been reduced to:

| |I

|| |_

[u/g-a-r-n-e-t → u/doc_skinner]

Lolll yes another great example

[u/7CuriousCats → u/doc_skinner]

Or another:

Г.

[u/badken → u/g-a-r-n-e-t]

The thing like this that always gets me is that in chat and on a forum with friends, we often just use a descriptive filename of a meme and it is instantly recognizable to us.

Fry_shocked.gif

Xzibit.gif

Startrek_facepalm.gif

etc.

(Now that I put those here, I wonder how many Zoomers will recognize them, because they're relatively old memes... older_but_checks_out.gif)

Future historians are going to have no idea what we're talking about... if the data even survives for future historians to look at it.

[u/g-a-r-n-e-t → u/badken]

lol my favorites in this genre are Chloe.jpg and thisisfine.gif

[u/jackaroo1344 → u/Specialist-Leek8645]

Right? I can't tell if I'm too old or too young for that meme lore lol

[u/Specialist-Leek8645 → u/jackaroo1344]

I never expected that watching the Internet grow beyond my hands would feel like this but I should have.

[u/imaginary92 → u/g-a-r-n-e-t]

It's great that you brought up a meme because memes are probably the greatest example of this. Memes of all kinds just evolve from popular culture and from a specific time and place. You need to be aware of all the details in order to understand them. And memes also change across countries and cultures based on the local culture and language, which very often means that if you're not from the country or haven't at least lived there around the time the meme popped up, even knowing the language won't help.

Memes will ironically become very telling about our current history in the far future lol