Plus a lot of that ephemeral online language barely even feels like “slang”: It’s too malleable, too referential, too yoked to cultural trivia. Sure, some new words have durable, dictionary-ready meanings, like the longstanding use of “thirsty” to capture social desperation or the fantastic “meat proxy” for someone who passes along A.I. work without reading it. But “goblin mode” (an embrace of slovenly, antisocial behavior) was more metaphor than neologism, and very obviously the sort of joke the internet exhausts and abandons within months. Preply’s roundup of this year’s top slang includes “the saxophones are getting louder,” a straightforward, full-sentence reference to an ominous musical cue from the film “Boyz N the Hood” — is that really slang?
These things really do need to be recorded somewhere, assuming we want our descendants to be able to parse the oceans of digital text we leave behind. Future historians will need to know what “skibidi” was, lest they mistake it for a protest movement or an obscure slur; they will need to decode countless dumb jokes and political dog whistles to make sense of old Elon Musk tweets for their magisterial studies of the feudal system on Mars. Social media from less than a decade ago already presents interpretive challenges, even for the terminally online.
But dictionaries, it turns out, are not the tool people use to solve this problem. I often turn to the website Know Your Meme, which started tracking internet habits almost 20 years ago and has since, improbably, come to feel like one of our most crucial and authoritative reference tools — the kind of resource you might expect to have a “.edu” at the end of its name. I refer this column’s fact-checkers to it nearly as often as the O.E.D.
Its usefulness stems in part from its format, which does not simply explain or define memes; it tracks down their origins, traces their spread, explains their shifting levels of irony and whiplash reversals of meaning. “The focus has been to treat internet-culture topics as if they’re kind of alive, in a way,” says Don Caldwell, the site’s editor in chief. Merriam-Webster says a beige flag is a neutral sign about a romantic partner; Know Your Meme documents its history as a warning that somebody’s boring.
Early on, Caldwell says, there were those who saw the site’s subject matter as “just goofy stuff on the internet” or who were angered by seeing their shibboleths explained. Not anymore. These days ideas can take shape as sardonic jargon in uncivilized reaches of the internet and end up penetrating the most consequential levels of political discourse; historians already need to parse memes. “It seems like it’s well understood, these days, how important this stuff is,” Caldwell says. “Almost everybody’s had to have a meme explained to them.”