If My Girl Drowning

Submission 34,595

Part of a series on Emoji. [View Related Entries]

About

"If My Girl Drowning" Snowclone refers to a snowclone popular mostly on Twitter in which a person presents a scenario in which both their girlfriend and another object are both drowning and they can only save one, and they usually elect to save the other object. The copypasta is generally littered with emoji.

Origin

The snowclone originally started on Black Twitter. The original post read "If my barber and my girl both drowning and I can only save one. Catch me at my girl's funeral with the freshest fade ever," with no emojis. The original post appears to have been deleted, but it was quoted on Twitter on August 1st, 2014, by @annaelizabethh_.^[1] That user was quoting a user named "KiranDavid_," who is likely Kiran David, an author who goes by the handle @KiranADavid (shown below).

Spread

The post spread through various text-reposting Twitter accounts until October of 2015. On October 13th, 2015, Twitter user @sanchovies^[2] added the emojis to the copypasta in a post that gained 451 retweets and 681 likes (shown below). After being reposted several times on Twitter with slight variations, the post was copied onto /r/emojipasta^[3] on April 26th, 2016. On November 2nd, 2015, @memearchive^[7] uploaded a version in which "memes" was inserted into the snowclone, gaining over 3,300 retweets (shown below, right).

In the following months, various other objects were applied to the Snowclone. On August 2nd, a variation with Harambe was posted to /r/emojipasta where it gained over 1,700 points.^[4] On September 2nd, 2016, gurl.com^[5] posted a compilation of popular examples of the snowclone on Twitter. One of the most popular examples, posted by @NathanZed^[6] on August 24th, inserts Jacob Sartorius into the snowclone, and gained 9,200 retweets and 17,000 likes (shown below, left). Another popular example from the same article by @HUNTYCHAN^[8] inserts the album EMOTION from Carly Rae Jepsen. As of July 27th, 2017, the meme continues to be used consistently.