KYM Review: Internet Slang of 2017

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined internet culture in 2017 as we know it.

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he year 2017 provided yet another glorious set of terms which will befuddle future historians. “Reading literature from 2017,” one imagines a professor saying while adjusting his super robot eyes, “and it seems the Twitter writer ‘@dongeydong69’ has claimed ‘Tayyip Erdogan be lookin like a snack?’”

With the turn of another year and a new harvest of memes, the English language continues its march down the weird path, picking up an assortment of very internet slang words that describe everything from racist viral stars and conservative buffoonery to Twitter science and fun new ways to be horny.

Of course, the slang pool of 2017 wouldn’t be complete without some of the nuggets tweeted out by the American president, and while Trumpisms like Fake News and covfefe certainly cracked mainstream lingo this year, on this list, they’ll receive honorable mention, as Trumpisms are definitely deserving of their own recap (wink, wink).

Anyway, without further ado: The Internet Slang of 2017.

Milkshake Duck

At some point or another, we’ve all had daydreams about posting a tweet that changes the course of American History. Last year, an Australian webcomic artist with an 8-bit rendering of a boat for an avatar did just that. In June of 2016, Twitter user Pixelated Boat tweeted a joke about a viral duck who drinks milkshakes, then unfortunately turns out to be racist.

Little did he know then that he had coined a term that ever-so-aptly describes a recurring pattern in today’s internet nanofame cycle: Ken Bone, the adorable voter who unfortunately looked at Jennifer Lawrence’s butthole? Milkshake Duck. The lead developer for The Last Night who turned out to be a huge pro-GamerGater? Big Milkshake Duck. The dude who saved a hawk during Hurricane Harvey and ended up sporting confederate flags in his home? You get the drill.

Pixelated Boat’s tweet became the term for a person whose viral fame is cut short after the dirt in their past is uncovered. It’s perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of the news-meme industrial complex bent on digging to the bottom of every story, no matter how small, for clicks, but so long as that environment exists, “milkshake ducks” are here to stay.

Whomst

For whatever reason, unnecessarily quaint and grammatically pretentious slang was all the rage in 2017, starting with whomst at the top of the list. A precursor to the expanding brain meme that ended up dominating much of the year, “whomst” first came about as an image macro of a kid getting more woke with each additional letter added to “who,” culminating in glowing eyes with “whomst’d.”

From there, what ensued was a golden age of grammatical anarchy, as words like “whomst’d’ve” and "shooketh" became part of the everyday vernacular on the internet throughout the rest of the year. Not coincidentally, the linguistic entropy started by “whomst” in 2017 fit right in stride with the humor that drove the “expanding brain” meme, an absurdist satire of insanely outlandish ideas masquerading as moments of awokening. TL;DR: People played the ironic fool by spewing words that seemingly sound lofty, but add up to little more than nonsense or pseudowords. It was good wholesome fun while it lasted, but here’s to hoping it goes away in 2018, am i right, fellow grammar nazis?

Trigger the Libs

2017 was the year the online dynamic between the left and right shifted. For years, it had been generally understood that the left were sensitive to certain issues, going so far as to seek out safe spaces, which in itself became a target of mockery for the right. After all, the world was not the same as the internet, and one couldn’t put a content warning on real life. This was a common joke among the right, who took the left’s perceived ease at being triggered as a sign of weakness.

With the dawn of the Trump-era, however, the same type people who you’d normally find on /pol/ were given a larger soapbox, while catch phrases like "Trigger the Libs" went from a joke among conservative trolls to an ethos that defined much of the Republican Party. The alt-right built an identity around doing things to piss off liberals, and the results were, frankly, embarrassing. Alt-righters began taking seemingly every asinine fight Trump picked and detail about his life and wore it like a badge of honor. This included not watching the NFL, eating steak well-done with ketchup, drinking milk and sushi at the same time, destroying Keurig machines, eating Papa John’s pizza, and perhaps most notably, dressing up in diapers, all to trigger the libs.

The left took notice of the right Twitter’s bold initiative to debase themselves in the hope it would piss off the left, and thus “Trigger the Libs” became a meme. Now let’s just hope it doesn’t get to the point where someone starts a nuclear war with North Korea for the sake of “triggering the libs.”

Lookin' Like a Snack

Since what seems like the dawn of time, the cycle of slang has spun in the same way: teens ape slang from AAVE and go on to confuse old people, who then use the slang without knowing the actual context, effectively killing it. This year, the term to be chewed out by the slang cycle was "Lookin’ like a snack".

To look like a snack is to be hot in such a way that others want to eat you up (but not in a vore kinda way). Though it first appeared in the late 2000s, the term went mainstream in 2017 after a man tweeted an image of a hippo biting another on the butt.

After that, “lookin’ like a snack” remained on Twitter timelines as confused white people attempted to suss out what it truly means to “look like a snack.” Does Squidward look like a snack? Does Trump”? Am I a snack? And so on. The term hasn’t reached peak uncoolness yet--we’re still waiting on a news segment to warn parents about the hip new teen slang before we can declare it officially dead--but the phrase seems well on its way.

The Ratio

The Ratio is a Twitter axiom that became quite prescient in 2017. The rule is simple: if a tweet has significantly more replies than it has retweets or likes, then it is a bad tweet. Let’s observe some ratio’d tweets, shall we?

Zounds! Those are some bad tweets. The ratio is special because it provides empirical proof that one’s tweet stinks. No longer does a commenter need to try and point this out with logic or opinion. He or she may simply point to the ratio to demonstrate that no, people are not agreeing with or liking your comment, but rather typing angry responses. It became useful as takes became more absurd in 2017. And as people who suffer the worst ratios are often in positions of authority, the ratio offers some solace to folks who may despair at the state of the ruling class: at least they’re getting owned online.

Hold My Beer

Over the summer, a sudden influx of escalating PR disasters led to the phrase Hold My Beer entering the pop lexicon. First, Pepsi made a tone-deaf ad starring Kendall Jenner. Then, United Airlines beat and dragged a man out of an airplane. Then, Sean Spicer topped it all off by insisting that Hitler, Adolf Hitler of Holocaust fame, never used chemical weapons on his citizens. The bewildering pace of these giant gaffes reminded internet users of a night of drunk debauchery where people attempt to one-up each other’s crazy stunts, saying before each stunt, “Hold My Beer.”

After that, “Hold My Beer” became a popular refrain for times when folks thought things couldn’t get any crazier in 2017 (and pretty much everything got crazier in 2017). When looking at the state of things, it sure can seem like like America is a drunk frat house filled with people trying to out-crazy each other, can’t it?

Corn Cobbed

Arguably, no one had a harder year than liberal centrists of America. The ascent of Donald Trump largely shattered the ideal that America was a land built around compromise and bipartisanship between two respectable parties, and as a result many a liberal centrist on Twitter, well, broke, for lack of a better term. These people are pretty easy to identify. They’re the ones who breathlessly shared Eric Garland’s infamous It’s Time For Some Game Theory thread, or have a Doughnut Emoji in their handle, or have basically devolved into saying everyone I don’t like is Russia. These are also usually the people who get “corn cobbed”:/memes/corn-cobbed.

To be corn cobbed is to be owned online. The phrase originated from a Dril tweet in which the infamous shitposter cried he was not owned and then transformed into a corn cob. This became a popular modus operandi for centrists on Twitter presented with information that contradicted their worldview. As people like, say, Louise Mensch or Candice Aiston called Bernie Sanders supporters Russian operatives, they slowly shrank into corn cobs.

Basically, “corn cobbing” is a way for the left to troll high-and-mighty political centrists. It’s a harmless term yet its growth was spread by a bizarre interpretation from its targets that it was a homophobic slur. It also led to the greatest tweet of the year from John Stoehr, who, bless his heart, demanded answers about the common parlance of the time:

Hewwo

The internet, in its mysterious wisdom, sometimes chooses to make memes seemingly out of thin air. Such was the case with Hewwo, a babyish spelling of “hello” that seemed to simultaneously anger everyone and be the funniest shit ever. I submit as evidence this performance of the original Then Perish shitpost, which features the most on-point portrayal of a person who’d use “hewwo” I’ve yet heard:

It seems “hewwo” spread as a trollish way to evoke oWo culture, the kind of cutesy, cringey language when you get into that part of Tumblr, and as people imagined the cringey part of Tumblr in the real world, the jokes got really funny. It’s the harmless sort of humor that makes Tumblr special in the meme world: the site’s tendency to meme the most innocuous and random things means that while they often create bizarre memes, they also create genuinely funny stuff.

Dilly Dilly

Bud Light are no stranger to advertising through forced memes. Arguably one of the most famous ad campaigns featured two lizards going “Wazzaaaaaaaaaaaap?” In 2017, they recaptured some of that magic with their "Dilly Dilly" campaign. A parody of Game of Thrones, the “Dilly Dilly” ads take the piss out of people who prefer drinks created with craft over repurposed Buffalo Bills fans' sweat by sending them to the “pit of misery.”

The Dilly Dilly ads have spread like a plague upon sports-watchers everywhere since they debuted in August, airing during what seems like every commercial break of every sporting event. And sports fans have run with it, repeating Bud Light’s sarcastic cheer when their teams suck (so it’s said a lot in Cleveland). The Dilly Dilly virus officially infected all of football when the Pittsburgh Steelers used the phrase as an audible. Gotta hand it to Bud Light: they understand the power of memes.

Horny On Main

Tumblr had an absolutely bananas year in terms of memes and microscandals, but perhaps none was as bizarre as the outing of Constable Frozen as an alleged vore enthusiast. Constable Frozen had been making incredible photoshopped fan art of Disney’s Frozen for several years, confusing and beguiling Tumblr while developing a sizable fan base. Then one day one photoshop was just a little too sexual and it clicked: He had been horny on main the whole time!

To be “horny on main” is to accidentally expose your sexual proclivities on your main social media account rather than the alt-account designated for that purpose. It started in Furry culture and began seeing use around 2016, but it went mainstream when Ted Cruz famously liked a pornographic tweet, making him the highest-profile person to commit the sin of being “horny on main.” Then the slang became a joke, and suddenly, like Spartacus, everyone was claiming to be “horny on main.” And thus everyone was cool with each other’s fetishes forever lmao jk can you imagine?