By Maria Doumit
Memes have emerged in the last decades as a mode of communication online; everyone that is active on the Internet has stumbled upon a meme, tried to understand it and shares it with friends and family. To understand memes, people need to think at least a bit of what the meme talks about and what makes it funny. Memes have therefore become a mode of communication and transmission that requires thought. This creates a kind of community and shared understanding among people on the Internet: memes unite users and produce a culture specific to them. A meme template can be used for several characters and situations while keeping its meaning and characteristics, and so they become a sort of personal tool to share opinions, ideas or just send someone something funny. In this essay inspired by an article I read, I will deconstruct the “Doge” meme and show its social implications as well as prove that by keeping certain characteristics, the meme can be used in different forms without compromising its meaning.
The “Doge” meme trend started in 2013 and is still a widely used template till now. Let’s start by understanding what really characterizes the “doge” meme: the trend started with pictures of a dog (a Shiba Inu specifically) known as “doge”, along with captions such as “much wow” and other words that don’t really make sense grammatically, but still get their meaning through. The font used in these captions is Comic Sans, the words are usually all in lowercase and the colors are typically fluorescent shades. Here is an example of a “doge” template tackling the issue of the pronunciation of its name “Doge”, which is still to this day unknown.
But the meme is not constraint to the typical picture of the Shiba Inu, and many memes emerged that, although show a different picture, still apply the rules of the doge and can be recognized using the captions. Here is a meme in which the face of the Shiba Inu has been photoshopped on top of the famous painter Bob Ross’ body, the captions are all related to the subject of the image.
However, the rules can be broken even more, to the point where we don’t even need the picture of the Shiba Inu to recognize the meme. Below is an image of a Duke of Venice, ironically commonly known at the time as Doge of Venice, with the usual meme captions:
So regardless of the image, the Doge meme can be easily recognizable. However, the author of the article is a linguist, and is therefore fascinated by the impact of the language used in the meme, which is essentially what makes it so distinguishable. He is particularly interested by a piece of poetry that he stumbled upon on Tumblr, which seemingly retells the story of “Romeo and Juliet”, but in Doge. Below is an image of the poem, in which every sentence was written by a different user, and although the characteristic elements of the meme aren’t present (such as the picture of a Shiba Inu, or the fluorescent captions), the text is still incredibly doge:
Of course, many users have also come up with creative and diverse versions of the meme and have shown how versatile doge is. Here comes the main question: what truly makes a meme “Doge”? And here comes the linguistic analysis of the “doge” language:
First of all, there are texts that the author call “doge phrases” and are mainly composed of two words such as “many happy”, “much wow”, “very art” scattered all around the image; sometimes you can even find single words but these are less frequent.
Now, delving deeper into doge language we can see that single-worded doge sentences are usually a shortened version of words such as “excite” instead of “exciting” or “amaze” for “amazing”. But what’s really interesting is the two-word doge phrases: the first word is usually one of the following: so, much, very, many or such; to choose which word to use after the author defines something called “selectional restriction” which basically means that specific words match with certain others, or else the meme won’t make sense! Based on his analysis, “such” goes with both adjectives and nouns; “very” and “so” are used with nouns and “many” or “much” before adjectives; and all of them can be used with verbs!
After analyzing the rules of grammar of the “doge” meme, we now move into understanding the reason why the meme’s core rests in not following proper English grammar. One of the main reasons is that people have developed an “online language”, a way of speaking only found on the Internet: less structure, incoherence, abbreviations… Internet languages have evolved from starting with abbreviations using numbers and single letters such as “C U L8R” or “4EVER”, to typed Emojis like “:) ;D and ^-^” to the current meme generation. Another reason for doge’s lack of proper grammar can be related to the way people usually talk to their pets: indeed, the influence of this “baby talk”, in which people typically speak in exaggerated tones and with overly simplified sentences, can be observed in the doge meme based on the assumption that pets would speak back in the same way their owners talk to them. But the origins of the doge meme don’t interest us as much as the effect of memes on the culture.
Like previously mentioned, anybody can understand memes with a bit of thought, or at least recognize specific patterns which help decipher the purpose of a meme. The doge meme in this essay was used as an example to show that meme culture has infiltrated our lives and culture in such a way that people start communicating using memes, or some of their characteristics. I even find myself sometimes throwing references such as “much work” or “amaze” in the middle of a normal conversation; and what is truly amaze is that the receiver most frequently understands what I said! Memes have had such an important impact on generations of social media users, because due to their ease and speed of transmission, and their ability to communicate meanings, they have become a core element in the lives of people, and in the overall culture: we all have seen, shared or received a meme at least once. Memes are essentially a form of satire, parody and therefore postmodern art. They are created mainly to make people laugh and mock something. The proliferation of memes, and the fact that they have become such a big part of our daily routines can sometimes lead to overexposure of users to an abundance of memes, and an increase in insensitivity to the issues that are more important due to being bombarded by too much information. This reminds me of Sontag’s idea that an over saturated world of images has made the world insensitive to what truly matters; She believes that some images can be drained by their true power due to they way they’re used and how frequently they’re seen, and where.
In conclusion, memes are an important aspect to consider when analyzing today’s online culture: people communicate using these visuals and their characteristics, such as the ones we went over for the Doge meme in this essay, are easily recognizable which plays a big role in how easy it is to understand memes. Due to their speed of transmission and simplicity, memes have become a major component of Social Media and constitute a fast way to communicate ideas to other users.
REFERENCE
McCulloch, G. (n.d.). A linguist explains the grammar of Doge. wow. The Toast. Retrieved 2021, from https://the-toast.net/2014/02/06/linguist-explains-grammar-doge-wow/.
Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press.
Sontag, Susan. (2004). Regarding the pain of others. Penguin Books, pp 3-39.
(PDF) just a joke? the social impact of internet memes. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2021, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341738736_Just_a_Joke_The_Social_Impact_of_Internet_Memes.