The Heaviest Things
Spotted: 9/26/2016
Creator: Motivational(?)
Oh geez. A friend sent me this one, and quite frankly, there’s a whole lot of WTF in this meme. I’m pretty sure that was the point, but still … thanks for nothing, man.
First, let’s address the text. Major required changes include capitalizing the first word, adding a period at the end of the sentence, and spelling out “Anonymous” instead of using an abbreviation. The greater-than sign (>)doesn’t really do much for the quote, so I would get rid of that. Also, since we apparently have a quotation here (albeit an unattributed one), let’s add some quotation marks, shall we?
I’m not going to address the use of feels as a plural noun. Whatever floats your boat.
Attribution is an interesting topic. According to the English Language & Usage forum over at StackExchange, the proper punctuation mark for citing a quote is actually the “horizontal bar,” (U+2015), which is sometimes called the “quotation dash.” Most people have never even heard of the horizontal bar, so the em-dash (U+2014) is an acceptable alternative. The more you know, right?
I was curious about and the image. I’ve seen Pepe the Frog before, of course, and understand the origins of his starring role in the meme. It’s interesting that Pepe’s image was recently reclassified as a “hate symbol” by the Anti-Defamation League. I don’t know whether this meme predates that or not. This picture looks more loving than hateful, so I’m not going to worry about it.
But seriously—doesn’t it look like the white guy is feeling up the frog? I assumed, when I first saw the meme, that this was some kind of spotting technique for people doing squats. To confirm my hunch, I did a Google image search for “spotting for squats.” Guess what I found?
That’s literally the very first image in the search results. Let’s go to Photoshop….
So while we have no idea where the quote came from, we can be pretty sure about the origins of the image. The spotter in the photo is even wearing white!
My last criticism is about the graphic format of the original meme. Any expert will tell you the best aspect ratio for posts on most social media platforms is squarish or just slightly horizontal. Of all of the things that are terrible about the meme above, its composition is one of the worst.
I’m really not recommending that anyone share this meme. It’s weird and creepy and potentially offensive. But if you must share an image of a poorly drawn white guy feeling up a symbol of hate above a barely intelligible quotation that can’t even be attributed to anyone, here you go. Knock yourself out.
