I think I remember reading a Reddit post once about a girl whose boyfriend would say things in real life like "can we get some f's in the chat boys". Things that were clearly very niche and would either be completely unintelligible to the audience or at best sound out of place. I think it's a matter of reading the room.
Every day that goes by, the out group of internet slang and memes grows smaller. I don't really know if I'd consider this a good thing or a bad thing so much as just, a thing. But there's a lot of joking amongst younger internet folk about how they'll probably be talking internet slang in retirement homes in a few decades. It's a funny visual, perhaps because of the weird perception that we always think we will be like today's older people as we grow older for some reason.
Those Reddit threads make for good entertainment today, however fake they probably usually are. But for better or worse, some day, I suspect it's going to flip around.
20 years ago, my mother heard me use the word "hack" in a casual context and panicked, assuming on the basis of the word alone that I meant criminal activity.
2 years ago, I was walking through Target and an advertisement came across the store loudspeakers touting "Mom hacks." Nerd culture has spread.
If you went to some public place with a fairly representative sample of the population, like a supermarket or something, and asked 100 people about that phrase, how many do you think would know provenance of it?
It's from a Call of Duty video game. The game had a scene where you were at a characters funeral, and a prompt came up saying "Press F to Pay Respects". This was widely criticized and mocked by players, and it spread from there to be used to either legitimately convey respect or to sarcastically mock something.
In one of the call of duty games, you attend a funeral and when you reach the casket, an onscreen prompt asks you to press F to pay your respects. This took on a life of its own, and now on Reddit threads you’ll see people saying press f to pay respects when someone was figuratively killed.
Wow, okay, and they claimed it's not an obscure reference, but you have to have played a certain level in a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what it means? Maybe obscure doesn't mean what I think it means.
It's a popular meme so you don't have to have played the game or even really be much of a gamer. You'd have come across it at some point hanging out on social media.
1. how many people don’t “hang out” in social media culture, and only circulate on there with family and peers using everyday idioms and emoji/abbreviation; if they use social media at all,
2. how many different, disjoint online cultures there are. Many things widely circulated on reddit and adjacent communities may never surface on some FB mom’s group
People maintain much more different lives from each other than you seem to assume, even among those that who are “terminally online” or that “hang out on social media”
I was just pointing out that knowledge of the meme wasn't as obscure as having actually played the game, which would be a much more limited audience than even just reddit users.
>Wow, okay, and they claimed it's not an obscure reference, but you have to have played a certain level in a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what it means?
You just had to have played that game, and the game isn't obscure. Call of Duty is one of the largest franchises on earth and I would consider it akin to something like a Marvel movie in popularity. If someone referenced a meme from a marvel movie, I wouldn't describe it as obscure.
I've played a Call of Duty game and watched several Marvel movies, and no one is claiming either is obscure. What I am saying is that just because you hang out in forums where this is a common phrase does not mean it has exposure to the wider world. It is unknown to 99% of the world, by definition obscure.
As with most idioms, most of the people who reference it have no clue what the origin of the expression is. Knowing the etymology of something is not a requirement for understanding what it means.
I would argue that there is a 100:1 ratio of people who know know what the reference means vs. having actually played the game. Maybe even closer to 1,000:1. Kinda like how lots of people know the “World Series” is a baseball tournament, but most people have never watched it.
My regular friend group who uses that phrase have all read the play, some even who have performed it. I'm sure I'm not alone, but then again, I have the intuition to find people with similar life experiences and religion.
Where I am, the F meme has pretty much become part of regular conversation, just like "lol". Granted, I exist in urbanized techie gen z spaces so ymmv.
