'political cartoons ARE NOT MEMES!!!' lmao

truly amazing meme

thanks!

Pocket phone prediction is more spot on than the cartoonist themselves realized, Amish men got shunned because of the emergency alert test going off

The thing he didn't foresee was the ability to turn the phone on silent mode.

We can put it on silent,, but that doesn't mean everybody does when they should!

Their hyper loop drawing is missing the Costco tube communication sound, a nice "thoonk!" Noise.

The atmospheric railway! Patent US 21,652, system for turning rats into viscera.

I think that OP's sentiment is more against gatekeeping what a meme is. Like if this is a meme, than political cartoons are too

Eh, what "meme" actually means and what it currently means in popular culture are two different things. People never understood what it really means, but the most commonly used meaning of it is constantly changing.

The word itself was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. But it wasn't a commonly used term until around 2005, even then it was used exclusively for specific things and few people knew its actual meaning. But memes in their literal sense have almost always been a thing, and they're common among many species.

The chad vs. virgin meme was originally the reverse. Virgin did things the way you would expect them to be done, and Chad did things in a reckless or incorrect way.

The sheer gall required to condemn "yellow press" while pulling this naked manipulative baloney. "Oh yeah well your customers are like this, 'Durrr! Duhhh!' That's what you sound like! Yes-huh!"

The smarm was less thick when Colbert opened a show with "Hey America, have you lost weight?"

Yes. Or rather, it was flashlight photography, as opposed to "old fashioned" photography where you had to hold perfectly still for several seconds. Of course, flash powder existed before, but it was messy, dangerous, flammable and left a layer of white ash everywhere. Most people today would only recognise the pan full of magnesium flash powder from cartoons, but you can probably guess it wasn't popular at parties or with hobbyists.

In the 1920s, flash bulbs were the awesome new thing, meaning you could take split second photos, and those could be action shots, and not staged and posed portraits. Taking a flashlight was doable quickly and easily, and of course as we all know, most random photos by random people aren't great.

The name photograph was already used for the old thing, so "flashlight" became the obvious abbreviation.

TIL?

Hell one could argue that memes are as old as social constructs

So they could in all likelihood predate moden humans

Language is an in-joke that got wildly out of hand.

Are animal paintings in caves memes too?

Richard Dawkins, is it you?

I'd argue that the "modern meme" of photo with caption are just a modification of demotivational posters

oh ya I forgot about this one, total classic political cartoon meme too

C O P E

A C A B
C A B A
A B A C
B A C A

So, uh, yes.

Yes (IMO) it does count.

It was passed down for centuries in a non-gene based way among people

For anyone unaware:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

A grammatical but boring sentence in Latin which is like eight different kinds of palindrome. It was the "cool S" of ancient Rome.

I got nerd-sniped by this a while back and tried finding any English equivalents, and long story short, there really aren't any. It takes one palindromic word, two words which are also words when reversed, and some implications about matching letters between words. I just wrote a function that recognized when a fifteen-letter string matched the requirements (the latter ten letters being a reversal of the first ten) and trimmed down a dictionary.

The results still rely on a lot of... almost-words. Like "apart paler alala relap trapa." Some of these are loanwords and some of these are nonsense. "Darts apart radar trapa strad" is closer. "Farad acara radar araca daraf" highlights two things: ACARA is an Australian agency, because my dictionary was a spellcheck file, and the daraf is a unit proposed by one guy who was explicitly spelling farad backwards, because us STEM types are all huge dorks.

After some editing, here's a list of what didn't seem like complete bullshit: Asses stime siris emits sessa. Cares amene refer enema serac. Damon animo minim omina nomad. Darts apart radar trapa strad. Dedal enema dewed amene laded. Detar enema tenet amene rated. Farad amora rotor aroma daraf. Gater amene tebet enema retag. Gnats nonet anana tenon stang. Hales amene level enema selah. Kayak amapa yaray apama kayak. Lasso amahs sagas shama ossal. Lasso artus stats sutra ossal. Laton animo tipit omina notal. Marts apart radar trapa stram. Mural ulema rever amelu larum. Namer amene mesem enema reman. Paler amene lemel enema relap. Parts apart radar trapa strap. Rater amene tenet enema retar. Redes edile divid elide seder. Sarah aroma rotor amora haras. Stats tenet anana tenet stats. Straw trapa radar apart warts. Sumac ulema mesem amelu Camus.