Made of 100% Cotton; It's Sales are 99% Ironic | Hacker News Reader

Made of 100% Cotton; It's Sales are 99% Ironic

washingtonpost.com

13 pointsphyscab11 comments

The really strange thing is that reviews of wolf shirts have been a meme on Reddit for months (years?)... then a few days back I saw it on Digg with something like 6000 diggs. As far as I was concerned it was an old and tired meme which had reached its peak who knows how long ago, but it looks like it somehow got revived and amplified.

There are probably two cycles to memes - one for the tech crowd / early adopters and one for everybody else. I frequently hear about stuff from my non-geek friends that I had heard about 1-2 years earlier.

My own anecdotal evidence agrees with this. LOL cats, FAIL, Rick Roll, Xzibit's catch phrase; this list goes on.

It seems most of these memes originate or are popularized on relatively geeky web forums (4Chan, Reddit, eBaum's, SA, etc), where they propagate among those forums' readers -- the sort of geeky people that spend their time on web forums. After a while a meme reaches critical mass and spills over into popular culture, and the geeky early-adopters have to listen to the meme they helped spread all over again.

I don't think it began with reddit or digg. I do know that I had an irrational degree of anger when the real deal "born to roam" wasn't mentioned in these stupid MSM pieces

http://www.birkoph.com/Wolf_tshirt.htm

"Born to Bone" more like it.

Oh I agree. It's like when you hear some teenager saying how much they love the new, lame remix of some old song.

Current offender: "Right Round" by Flo Rida.

Am I the only person who wants to stab my eyes out whenever I see the word 'ironic'? I count two appearances in the article, and one in the title.

You're probably not the only person, but I do think that irony has its place.

The ability to imply one meaning by saying its opposite is definitely part of the verbal toolkit that I'd have problems living without.

Irony is fine. I'm just tired of its current popularity: http://www.google.com/search?as_oq=ironic+irony&as_sites...

Perhaps not 'stab my eyes out' pain, but does snorting piping hot Darjeeling count?

Apostrophe's and they're use's

Hey, I'm a science/math guy. I can do triple integrals in my sleep but proper english grammar is a whole other ball game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com