Bike Is Short for Bichael

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About

Bike Is Short For Bichael refers to a snowclone popular on Reddit, particularly /r/me_irl, in which people say the names of common objects and things are actually short for human names.

Precursor

The earliest incarnation of this joke known comes from a 2014 Tweet by Twitter user @MatCro who said "Weird that everyone called Mike is actually called Micycle."(shown below)

The following year Tumblr user loldodgers made a post which read "What if Mike was short for Micycle"(shown below)

Origin

On December 1st, 2017, Zoe Quinn, @UnburntWitch^[1] on Twitter, tweeted "bike is short for bichael." The tweet gained over 3,800 retweets and 18,500 likes (shown below).

Spread

On December 3rd, 2017, Redditor Han_Soko uploaded a screen shot of the tweet to /r/me_irl and gained over 2,200 upvotes.^[7] Shortly after, Redditor stonetortoise^[6] uploaded the comment in a Most People Rejected His Message edit, gaining over 1,900 upvotes (shown below).

After that post, people began riffing on the joke, using the phrase with different words. On December 4th, Redditor TotallyNotTomoe^[5] uploaded an edit which read "Hike is short for Hicheal," gaining over 6,000 upvotes (shown below, left). The same day, Redditor cufnij^[2] uploaded an edit in which the Nike logo was altered to read "Nichael," gaining over 2,800 points (shown below, right). A post to /r/MemeEconomy^[3] about the trending meme gained over 260 upvotes. There have also been several edits that have used different name puns other than "Michael."