Ruin a First Date in Four Words

Submission 35,661

About

Ruin a First Date in Four Words is a word game that involves coming up with humorous four-word sentences that could potentially spoil a romantic date.

Origin

On May 11th, 2016, a image with the words "Ruin a first date in four words" over a black background with four blank boxes was submitted to 9gag^[2] (shown below). In the comments section, viewers responded with various four-word jokes related to bad dates.

Percursor

In December 2014, the Twitter hashtag #WorstDateInFiveWords^[1] was launched along with humorous descriptions of bad dates (shown below).

Spread

On May 25th, a image macro compilation featuring responses to the "ruin a first date in 4 words" prompt was uploaded to 9gag.^[3] That day, 2CoolFishing Forums^[7] member gom1 submitted a thread titled "Ruin a date in four words."

On September 28th, the Veterans Against Tattoos Facebook^[5] page posted a variation of the blank template with the caption "Wanna see my tats?" (shown below). Within five days, the post gathered upwards of 330 reactions and 70 shares. On September 29th, Imgur^[6] user sleepless01 uploaded the blank template.

The following day, users on the Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes Facebook^[4] page posted edited versions of new template, which were subsequently removed by moderators. On October 3rd, The Daily Dot^[8] published an article about the meme's circulation on Facebook.