Accept, Except, Expect

Submission 12,585

About

Accept, Except, Expect refers to a series of memes about English students confusing the phonetically and structurally similar English words "accept," "except," "expect," and "aspect." The memes usually depict several people who are identical twins or lookalikes with very slight differences and are object labeled with the words. The meme is similar to other memetic concepts such as "Your vs. You're" and "It's vs. Its."

Origin

In the English language, the words "accept," "except" and "expect" have different meanings but are relatively close to each other phonetically and structurally. Multiple instructional materials^[1]^[2]^[3] explaining the difference between these three words, with the occasional inclusion of additional words such as "aspect," can be discovered online.

Understanding the difference between the words has been a recurring joke among non-native English speakers at least since mid-2019. On July 10th, 2019, X^[4] / Twitter user @avishist made one of the earliest posts with the joke (shown below, left). On October 20th, Facebook^[5] user Tanna Monali made a similar post that gained over 80 reactions in five years (shown below, right).

Spread

The joke saw further spread in the early 2020s as users posted object-labeling memes based on it on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. For example, on June 11th, 2020, Redditor godchaser111 posted a meme that received over 20 upvotes in the /r/meme^[6] subreddit in six months (shown below, left).

On December 2nd, 2021, the Facebook^[7] page ক্যাম্পাসিয়ান posted a meme that gained over 960 reactions and 10 shares within three years (shown below, right).

Several memes based on the joke achieved viral spread in the following years. For example, on June 14th, 2023, the Facebook^[8] page Sarcasm posted an object-labeling meme based on an AI-generated image of Tom Cruise with two body doubles that received over 34,000 reactions and 2,300 likes in one year (shown below).