The Daily Freeman (

IVAN LAJARA: Five memes you need to stop using


Sunday, February 19, 2012

Internet memes -- the contagious inexplicable trends that make people post pictures of cats with quotes or bad puns related to basketball star Jeremy Lin -- are getting, well, linsane.
Visit your Facebook profile on any given day, and instead of getting flooded with the usual invitations to events you won't attend or photos of babies you don't care about, you will be welcomed by lincredible posts lin your face that will be repeated to linfinity.
The weird thing is that, after a while, you'll understand the meme -- a true sign that you're spending way too much time online -- and you will attempt to use it. This is when your friends will kindly tell you that the meme has gotten old and bothersome. Your linability to linguistically linclude and linundate your friends with the same nonsense will bother you.
But fear not.
Though you won't be able to get rid of headlines that start with "Lin" for the time being, there are other memes that come and go. You must resist the urge to repost them because you think they're funny. Remember that the moment you post them is the very moment the thing stopped being funny. Your friends will make sure to remind you of that.
As a service to the community, and because we don't feel like writing anything of real substance, we hereby provid you with a handy list of recent memes that have most likely inundated your online space (If you've never been online, don't start now. It's filled with cats, anyway).
o Pictures of people saying things. This is the practice of having nothing original to say, so it consists of posting an image that involves an overly long quote with a photo of the person who said the quote. This image will be initially posted by someone and reposted by one of your friends. Then another friend will post a constructive comment -- like, "LOLZ. Totally stealing this :D" -- and then said friend will proceed to post it on his or her wall, ensuring that the same image appears on your wall again. This chain of events will repeat itself until it has reached all your friends and every other post you see is that image. (The other posts are requests to play "Cow Clicker," the amazing game where you get to click on a cow and wait for a long time before you can click on the cow again.) Anyway, this is a bulletproof way of making people hate you. And Gandhi quotes. To prove the point, we went to Facebook, and posted a photo of a crazy dude with long hair along with the following quote: "I'm getting kind of tired of people posting photos of a dude with a quote in the photo."
o "Stuff people say" videos. These videos exploded over last month. They consist of a quick succession of familiar sayings from people from a particular group -- girls, journalists, NPR listeners, Gothamists and, of course, cats. There are even "Stuff people say about stuff people say" and "stuff nobody says" videos. You probably thought these were all silly and infantile, until you saw the one about your profession and/or hobby and thought it was hilarious, posted it on Facebook and then complained that people just don't understand knitters (cats do, but for different reasons). Also, the S-word in the title, for the record, is not "stuff."
o "What People Think I Do" images: These are posts consisting of six images that try to illustrate how different people view a specific profession, be it poets, artists, librarians and all those other unemployed people who now spend their time creating "What People Think I Do" images and clicking on cows.
o Linsanity. This is the practice of trying to add 'Lin' to every word in the dictionary even if everyone's tired of it already. It also is a candidate for the Word of the Year, according to the American Dialect Society. But they have linguists, so they're biased.
o Publicly complaining about memes. If there is something more annoying than "What People Think I Do" images it is people who complain incessantly about them -- with "What People Think I Do" images, which is exactly what we did. Surprisingly, we were told people are getting tired of this already.
But we're unfazed, as we are busy and important. Now, if you excuse us, we have some cows that need to be clicked on.