Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

A year later, I was spending more and more time on the internet, a necessary diversion from the master’s thesis I was supposed to be writing. I started seeing a new style of image meme, one that avoided the one-two setup and payoff in black-bordered white Impact for a series of smaller phrases scattered around the face of a round-faced dog in Comic Sans. One with—joy of joys—a new and peculiar grammar. I started analyzing it in my head, vowing that I’d write up a description of this new meme the moment my thesis was in. This was a meme known as doge, based on a photo by Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato of her shiba inu, and I ultimately wrote a linguistic analysis of it for the eclectic and now sadly departed website The Toast in 2014. Doge was one of several memes that sprouted with this scattered interior monologue caption style, which draws on the minimalist typography that we saw in Chapter 4. A later example was snek, which was based on multiple photos of snakes and often featured softened swear words like “heck” and the phrase “doing you a [verb].”