Cover Myself in Vaseline and Pretend I'm a Slug

About

"Cover Myself in Vaseline and Pretend I'm a Slug" a joke statement posted to forums and comment boards to elicit a reaction. It is often used as an example of a Google Search Suggestion, due to the phrase's origin and its bait-and-switch nature.

Origin

The oldest known example of the phrase dates back to March 30th, 2010 on Joy Reactor^[1]. The image shows a doctored Google search suggestion of "sometimes at night I", while using the Rage faces Poker Face and the OMG Rage face as a reaction to the search result.

Spread

On September 1st, 2011, a Facebook community page^[2] titled "Sometimes i like to cover myself in vaseline, and pretend im a slug" was created by an anonymous user. Within two weeks, the page had 58,000 likes.

The phrase spread through YouTube comments, forums, and Reddit. On September 20th, 2011, user Paramorgue posted a screenshot of a YouTube comment of the phrase with the title "This kid had some problems with the instructions."^[3] The post garnered 741 votes (90% upvoted).

The phrase, as well as variants of it, became frequently used on Yahoo! Answers. ^[4] In the fall of 2011, 9 separate questions were asked with variations on the theme "Where's the cheapest place to buy Vaseline?" When the user clicked in, they learned the reason the asker needed Vaseline was for his or her night-time slug habits.

Various Examples

Other Derivatives

Similarly phrased have appeared since "Slug". The most commonly used variant is "I like to cover myself with dirt and pretend I'm a carrot".

In May of 2012, the twitter account @Im_Home_Alone ^[5] was created, tweeting about doing things while pretending to be various things such as a refrigerator, gummy bear or a deer. The last tweet by this account was in September 2013.

Search Interest

External References