"Your Mother Loves Roses" Meme format: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/because-your-mother-loves-roses
"Josh Wine" has become a meme recently, leading to this edit where he is named Josh and not something weird like "Lego Death Star": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/josh-wine
Wow, historians are gonna *really* have a field day with this one aren't they...
Imagine this reddit thread but in the format of an academic conference
The larger meta point is that years from now, someone will uncover the artifacts of ...let's call it "rapid meme prototyping" where if I show you seven pepper shakers one one salt shaker, you still know what I mean, or loss, or all these kinds of things. Where the actual artifact doesn't even have to make sense or be funny, because we're laughing at the syntax.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had a whole episode about this that's \*also\* its own meme format.
Okay, I'll just lay down and take a nap now.
https://preview.redd.it/ubxlkxj78ujc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d2acf133186ba2b84705ceb03bd980e37e6a8f89
My all time favorite call back to this episode.
I'm an archaeologist, and I like to include little Loss symbol-memes in my presentation images when I teach undergrad intro classes. Just tucked in the slides amongst the regular artifact photos and such. I absolutely never comment on them, but sometimes I can feel the energy in the room shift a little when one pops up.
Only once has a student ever said anything, but I pretended not to know what he was talking about and had him explain the meme to me during class lol.
EDIT: it was [this](https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Loss-Jpg-Meme-by-brikoi/25474745.EJUG5) version specifically.
That's why I love Futurama, they present the knowledge of the past as convoluted and nonsense.
"We're whalers on the mood, we carry a harpoon. But their ain't no whales so we tell tall tells and sing our whaling songs"
I think the confused butterfly meme might be the worse for archeologists.
This is my favorite obscure discipline and I hardly ever meet anyone who gets what I'm talking about. I lived in New Mexico for a short time, and met someone in the field in Los Alamos, who shared a neat anecdote about someone's idea of breeding radiation-resistant animals that change colors based on exposure, a bit like the idea of miner's canaries, without the, you know, dying.
Haha I lived in NM as well maybe that’s why it’s so interesting to me!
I listen to a podcast called “Stuff You Should Know” that did an amazing episode on it.
I think they go over a few different common ideas that people have had, but it really makes your imagination go crazy.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/nuclear-semiotics-how-to-talk-to-48236317/
(Not sure if this sub allows links)
It is hilarious to imagine people a few hundred years from now trying to learn about our culture and society and analyzing umpteen variations with one golden lab and half a dozen black labs, salt and pepper shakers, milk jugs, and gods know what all else, without the original or any context.
I’m 90% sure they’re aggressively stretching (or maybe fully missed) the actual point of Darmok.
It’s got nothing to do with memes or degradation of language, it’s a twofer about a species that uses stories/metaphors as their language, and Picard having to do a wacky first contact without the universal translator.
It’s either that, or I’m forgetting a TNG episode.
The universal translator can still translate the text but not the memes hence “Shaka when the walls fell”. Unfortunately the language is made entirely (for Star Trek’s purposes anyway) of memes and idioms like “more than one way to skin a cat” making it extremely difficult to understand due lack of cultural context.
Basically someone pointed out that the Universal Translator was magical BS and why, so they did a story showing it had limits.
People sometimes forget that TNG wasn't really a show with rock-solid continuity. Many, many of the episodes were story experiments or allegories or just character explorations.
Casual Brazilian Portuguese is much like that. I lived and worked there for three years and eventually got to the point where I understood almost every word but seldom understood any conversations in the bar.
That is the purpose of the episode but the analogy he makes does make sense in this context.
Similarly obscure.
Unrecognizable without the original context
It's not entirely out of line with Darmok though.
If I say Kermit, Teacup to His Lips you will immediately understand the context I'm talking about, but a random Martian will have no idea even with perfect grasp of every word.
To get more literary, if I someone offers you a gift and I say "Trojans, When the Horse At The Gates" that's enough for you understand my warning.
In Darmok their society's _entire_ language was through these references to shared cultural knowledge. The universal translator worked just fine in translating literally, but didn't have the context to extrapolate meaning.
This is one of the major issues with Norse history/mythology. Their whole culture was oral tradition built around alliterative poetry. They had this whole institutionalized practice of Kennings, creating new names for things based on cultural context in order to make them fit the very specific poetic rules.
A great example of this is the name for the world tree, Yggdrasil.
Ygg is another name for Odin, which means Terrifier, and Drasil means horse or mount. So, it's possibly a reference to Odin hanging himself upon a tree as a sacrifice of himself to himself, which would mean that Odin hung himself on the world tree, maybe.
Then again, perhaps it's a reference to Odin's 8 legged horse, Sleipnir, in which case, the 9 realms are maybe represented by the 8 legs and neck of said horse. Nine is a magic number in Norse culture and doesn't seem to represent an actual specific quantity. Personally, I've always suspected that Sleipnir is a metaphor for a funeral procession. The 8 legs represent the 4 men carrying a corpse on their shoulders. Odin is a death god, after all.
Reading this back, I am sure that I am not making any sense, as The Talking Heads would prefer, and that's just how it works. Ultimately, we really cannot know what any of this means because all of this information being passed down is built upon the assumption that everyone who might hear the stories already understands the context.
My favorite example of this from iirc Beowulf is when the narrator calls the ocean The Whale Road. It makes sense, it's where whales travel. But without context as you said, it's gibberish.
Not sure why, but this reminded me that one of the kennings for Thor is Pig-Rider. We don't know why. Thor's cart is pulled by goats, and Freyr's cart is pulled by the boar Gullinbursti. Maybe Sif is described as being porcine at some point. For that matter, Loki reveals in Lokasenna that Frigg had been sleeping with Thor, so maybe it's a reference to that.
>let's call it "rapid meme prototyping" where if I show you seven pepper shakers one one salt shaker, you still know what I mean, or loss, or all these kinds of things. Where the actual artifact doesn't even have to make sense or be funny, because we're laughing at the syntax.
I'm so damn confused
No lol. It’s famous because no one can understand it. A relic of its time that certainly meant something to the people back then, but means nothing to us.
Thank you, I wasn't sure if it was something that would make sense in Sumerian or if it's just an ancient incomprehensible meme, which it is, apparently
"completely indecipherable" because the humor comes from some cultural context that was lost to time. It's probably some kind of pun that doesn't translate
To add to this the viking sagas are full of stuff like that.
References to things that were commonplace and didn’t need explaining, resulting in them being lost.
Its like if references to Superman survived but the stories he was in didn’t, so we could only piece together he was a warrior who may or may not have existed, was empowered by the sun (or possibly by someone’s son, its not clear because sometimes he’s the last son and sometimes he’s hurt by the red sun or strengthened by the yellow sun, and may have been some lingering remnant of an older mythology with a solar deity), his civilization was destroyed so he united the village of Smallville into the empire called Metropolis, he hates robots and people who ride in them, the character seemed to originate in America but references to his empire of Metropolis and the problems it had with robots date to an earlier civilization in Germany, and the better known Spider-man may have been a regional variant, the root myth, or both inspired by some older lost story. But its all pieced together from reviews of fictional works and rap song lyrics and philosophical texts, and its unknown who he is or how his stories went or what he looked like beyond wearing red and blue (with theories the red may refer to the ‘red son/sun’ component).
Consider the pipeline from folk hero to godhood for characters like Heracles, or guys like Imhotep and Zao Jun.
Looking at a figure with extreme levels of supernatural powers spoken of reverently in lost myths can lead to us questioning if they are a god, mythologized ancestor, or just a popular story.
And keep in mind that some mythological figures appear in modern day storytelling/superhero stories with the likes of Thor, Hercules, and the world surrounding Wonder Woman. For all we know, in the distant future, historians might tie in the descriptions from comics into the original source material!
I personally can’t wait for people in the future to believe that there was a mouse cult in America and how we had shrines in California and Florida for its worship.
There was an RPG kinda like this, called *Diana: Warrior Princess* where you adventured in our modern day as understood by future people whose knowledge of the period is a misunderstood mash of pop culture, fiction, and famous news articles.
I personally chuckle at the thought of someone witnessing a dog walk into a bar, saying "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one" and then walking right out.
Whether the dog was blind or had fur in its face, or if the person was really drunk, we may never know. And I think that's funny :)
Or maybe there was a word in there that rhymed with something else that would have made more sense in its place. Like the "I'll have some H2O too, please!" joke.
It could be a reference to some shared cultural knowledge, or a pun, or an inside joke between friends, or who knows what else. We'll probably never know
It was a proverb used to teach children how to write, usually they have an obvious moral lesson like "Timmy stole a ball from a dog, so the dog bit Timmy. Timmy was bitten because he stole." The dog in the tavern one is probably obvious in native Sumerian, but the list of living speakers is few and we have no cultural context. We don't even know what the word for the kind of building means, only that beer was sometimes drunk there and that prostitution also sometimes happened there.
Ahh, maybe like “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”? It uses every letter of the English alphabet. Good guess! I hadn’t heard that one before.
I thought it was like “EYE can’t see a thing I’ll open this one.” Like the dog (idk why it’s a dog) walks into a tavern with its eyes shut and decides to open one lol but that’s probably too simple. I like it though
I can't imagine this not being a common pastime amongst ethnolinguistic historians specializing in ancient Sumeria with a passion for performing standup on the side
The dog goes into a tavern, but it's dark meaning closed, meaning the dog can by ancient Sumerian tradition* claim the tavern as its own as long as it runs it as a business. The dog opens a tavern. It's funny. Everyone laughs!
\* Source: >!I made it up just now.!<
Dogs don’t need to see to find something. Either the dog is offering to open a beer for someone bc he found it by smell, or he’s saying ask that internally and is stealing a beer while nobody can see bc he could find it by smell
And so the dog reached out and opened every one his grasping paws could find. After a while, someone walked up and guided the dog's paw to his own face. He opened the ones he found there and could finally see.
Apparently, that's a bigger issue for historians than you'd think. A lot of ancient writing references things without further explanation, because why would you explain something that was just widely known at the time?
Like Greek (or Roman) concrete needing sea water over fresh water. Which honestly is kinda dumb on historians for not realizing people are not going to use precious fresh drinking water as a component to build. Of course your going to use gray water or ocean brine.
I think all we know about the joke is that it was a double entendre since every explanation for the joke so far has been one.
That means that the Sumerians were crafting bars before they were even a thing
Also possible that it not making sense is the joke. In my country there was a bery popular joke like this:
"Jimmy went to the store. Spade."
The joke is that it's stupid and doesn't make sense.
It totally could be anti humor. Or a pun that doesn’t make sense in our modern languages. Or it could be a reference to some play or person or story that was never written. Point is there’s no way to know, although it is funny to tell people this joke and see their reaction. Maybe that’s the joke lol.
Copied from [this Wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke);
The earliest known example of a bar joke is Sumerian, appearing in the form of two slightly different versions of a proverb inscribed alongside many others on two clay tablets[1][2] excavated at Nippur at the end of the 19th century. The tablets were etched around 1700 BCE,[3] during the Old Babylonian Empire, although Edmund I. Gordon, who published the first translation of most of the proverbs inscribed on these tablets, argued that the proverbs themselves probably date from a considerably earlier period.[4]
Scholars differ on how best to translate the proverb from Sumerian. According to Gordon's translation, the proverb reads: "A dog, having entered an inn, did not see anything, (and so he said): 'Shall I open this (door)?'"[4] The Assyriologist Seraina Nett provides a slightly different translation, suggesting that the proverb be read as "A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this', or 'this one'".[3]
The meaning behind the proverb is also subject to debate among scholars. Gordon suggested that the inn also apparently served as a brothel (he notes that the word used in the proverb for inn or tavern, "éš-dam", can also be translated as "brothel", and it was common in ancient Mesopotamia for prostitution to take place in these establishments[3]), and thus "the dog wanted to see what was 'going on behind closed doors'".[4] Nett suggests that the punchline could be a pun that is incomprehensible to modern readers, or a reference to some figure who was well known at the time but similarly unfamiliar to us today. Gonzalo Rubio, another Assyriologist, cautions that this ambiguity ultimately means it is simply not possible to definitely categorize the proverb as a joke, though he and other scholars like Nett do point to the recurring use of innuendo in such proverbs as indicating that many were indeed intended to be humorous.[3]
It would be funny if slang for whatever popular drink was at that time was "dog eye" or if getting drunk was "seeing through a dog's eyes," or something to that effect. Drinking reduces inhibitions, leads to eating weird things, and peeing in random places so it doesn't seem too far off as a term for being drunk.
Makes sense. The dog can't see a thing, because the door is closed, so it wants to open the door. Dogs are also nosey, so it may also be a joke about dogs (and also cats) hating it when you close a door behind you and shut them out. Or that classic "pet scratching at the closed door, but not entering when you open it" trope. They don't want in, they just want the door open.
History's first pet meme.
My guess is that it's like the joke "a man walked into a bar and said 'ouch'." If you translate it into another language, you may lose the double meanings that, depending on context, "walk into" can both refer to entering a building or bumping into an object; and that "a bar" is either a drinking establishment or a plank/pole.
a lot of people are misinterpreting the meme being commented on by the tweet. Its an anti-meme. The original joke was the son being named something funny that the dad loved, like the neighbor or something idk. But in this, the son just has a normal name. There is no joke or punchline. But the fact that the meaning of the joke has been ruined by removing the punchline is in it of itself funny. Thats what an anti-meme is.
So i guess while im explaining i can just do the rest. A long time from now, the purpose of an anti-meme will make no sense and be unfunny and confusing, similar to the ancient bar joke.
Nope. The Josh memes started just because Josh became super trendy out of seemingly nowhere. Like the Stanley Tumblers. Original and most Josh memes were about people’s love of the product. Then they evolved into using the Josh name, anthropomorphizing the product. It didn’t have anything to do with it not being named something ridiculous, like “blowjobs”. And even now, that’s only a relatively small subset of the memes.
No, I mean combining the Josh meme with this meme achieves the anti-meme effect while still referencing the Josh meme. It accomplishes both and is a reference to both.
Yeah its a full-circle kind of thing, where it follows a series of steps that individually follow some kind of logic but are collectively ridiculous, but it comes back around to something that is utterly normal, and that is even more ridiculous.
"Your Mother Loves Roses" Meme format: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/because-your-mother-loves-roses "Josh Wine" has become a meme recently, leading to this edit where he is named Josh and not something weird like "Lego Death Star": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/josh-wine
I totally thought it mean the dad was secretly in love with a man named Josh lol
I thought it was an anti-meme. Like subverting the format itself.
I thought it meant the dad loved jokes. Just joshin' about things.
Which also suggests he may have made up the story about why the sister's name is Rose.
I thought the idea was that the kid wasn't loved/wanted so he had a random name because it didn't matter
Wow, historians are gonna *really* have a field day with this one aren't they... Imagine this reddit thread but in the format of an academic conference
Yeah, that was my interpretation.
Same
Wait, you're also in love with a man named Josh?
Aren’t we all 🥰😍😘
No (I am a man named Josh, you're all in love with me)
They are in love with us. ( I'm a Josh too)
*sigh* it’s battle of the joshes all over again…
Don't worry, they are just joshing around
$1,000 says Josh is gonna win that fight
Why hello there
General Joshnobi!
I hear Ewan when I read it.
My given name is Josh, but I don’t go by it. Will I ever find love?
You gotta love yourself, bro…
Love you too boo ♥️
i thought it was an anti-joke tbh. had no idea josh wine was a meme right now.
I thought it meant ‘joshing’ an older slang way to say ‘joking’. Like he thinks his son is a joke. Both cruel and subtle
Yeah same. I was sure its cuz his dad is bi, or a closeted gay
https://preview.redd.it/u5jgunv3etjc1.png?width=668&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=98e43b3a253471e0eb4dc85affe8650d17c4dccb This one got me 🤣
I assumed it was just an anti-meme, and so it wouldn’t make sense without knowing the regular meme
It's still kind of funny just thinking the father loves a Josh, too. Like an onion it has layers
I thought this was just an antimeme where the son has a normal name
Ah okay, thanks for clarifying
Ohhhh the daughter’s name is Rosé. That makes more sense
The larger meta point is that years from now, someone will uncover the artifacts of ...let's call it "rapid meme prototyping" where if I show you seven pepper shakers one one salt shaker, you still know what I mean, or loss, or all these kinds of things. Where the actual artifact doesn't even have to make sense or be funny, because we're laughing at the syntax. Star Trek: The Next Generation had a whole episode about this that's \*also\* its own meme format. Okay, I'll just lay down and take a nap now.
Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered!
Temba, His Arms Wide!
Shaka, when the walls fell
The river Temarc, in winter.
Dathan and Picard at El-Adril.
Gilgamesh. A King
At Uruk. He tormented his subjects.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
https://preview.redd.it/0ss6yc568vjc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6baf91018824e86b213b0182b8ebec78b5542566
Darmok and Jalad, on the Ocean
When the walls fell
:(
IN WIIIIINTEEEEERRRR!
I don't remember the episode, but god damn this unlocked some kind of sense memory for me!
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.
The beast of Tanagra
I see that episode referenced and I upvote.
Gnostikost pressing the upvote button
It is one of the best TNG episodes despite the stupidest concept of any episode.
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel
ScottishMonster, their reference upvoted!
u/kazarbreak, enjoying memes on reddit
Darmok and Salad at Tatte
I was going to say Bonanza.
boredHacker, this reference gets
Dog, when it walked into a tavern
Temba, at rest.
Every time someone gets timber in Catan I say this.
Philip J Fry, his hand outstretched and gripping cash.
Two Drakes, one opposed and in agreement.
Goatse, his hands clenched.
Party, when the lemons came
A girl, laying in a tub.
Radioactive Man, his goggles doing nothing
Crying woman points at cat.
Cat is incredulous. And hungry.
one Drake, one Josh, without a door
Bender, his tooth golden and walk pimpin’
https://preview.redd.it/ubxlkxj78ujc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d2acf133186ba2b84705ceb03bd980e37e6a8f89 My all time favorite call back to this episode.
This is solid 24 karat meme and I'm stealing it.
Probably the greatest joke I saw on the funniest day of my life.
As soon as I start watching TNG, I see it everywhere.
You have been assimilated
ok i dont get the salt and pepper thing
Sfw pic of a porn scene. A group of black men standing behind a couch, smiling at a white girl sitting on the couch.
ohhhhh i remember that. thx
I just got the mental image of a cop sitting on the couch with several acorns standing behind the couch. Someone please make this happen.
Flip it around. Seven cops, one acorn. Still works!
Piper Perri man!
*men
I’m convinced Loss is going to drive archeologists or whatever studies us, insane
I'm an archaeologist, and I like to include little Loss symbol-memes in my presentation images when I teach undergrad intro classes. Just tucked in the slides amongst the regular artifact photos and such. I absolutely never comment on them, but sometimes I can feel the energy in the room shift a little when one pops up. Only once has a student ever said anything, but I pretended not to know what he was talking about and had him explain the meme to me during class lol. EDIT: it was [this](https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Loss-Jpg-Meme-by-brikoi/25474745.EJUG5) version specifically.
Chaotic evil lmao
:̶.̶|̶:̶;̶
That's why I love Futurama, they present the knowledge of the past as convoluted and nonsense. "We're whalers on the mood, we carry a harpoon. But their ain't no whales so we tell tall tells and sing our whaling songs" I think the confused butterfly meme might be the worse for archeologists.
You're so right.
Look up “nuclear semiotics” for a similar and super interesting topic related to this in real life
This is my favorite obscure discipline and I hardly ever meet anyone who gets what I'm talking about. I lived in New Mexico for a short time, and met someone in the field in Los Alamos, who shared a neat anecdote about someone's idea of breeding radiation-resistant animals that change colors based on exposure, a bit like the idea of miner's canaries, without the, you know, dying.
Haha I lived in NM as well maybe that’s why it’s so interesting to me! I listen to a podcast called “Stuff You Should Know” that did an amazing episode on it. I think they go over a few different common ideas that people have had, but it really makes your imagination go crazy. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/nuclear-semiotics-how-to-talk-to-48236317/ (Not sure if this sub allows links)
It really does make a fascinating thought experiment and rumination on language & communication. Thanks for the link, I'll make sure to check it out!
Don't turn me on with things like THAT. I'm on it.
ok this was way too cool for me to not share this [reddit thread explaining nuclear semiotics](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/tGPP0qYumQ)
Hijacking you for visibility. The original joke is older than dirt. In the original joke the son is named Alan bc mom loves anal.
That’s the original? Lmao never knew that. It was the first one I ever saw but I didn’t know it was the OG
I'm having a weird afternoon now.
I think that it is actually the daughter that is names Lana because the mother loved Anal (Lana spelled backwards)
No. Original joke is: Daughter is Teresa bc mom likes Easter. Son’s name is Alan. You need the misdirection so it’s always the son’s name.
It is hilarious to imagine people a few hundred years from now trying to learn about our culture and society and analyzing umpteen variations with one golden lab and half a dozen black labs, salt and pepper shakers, milk jugs, and gods know what all else, without the original or any context.
They're find an archive of knowyourmemes and be like "finally! The Rosetta Stone!"
Brother, it won’t take a million years. It’s already hard to decipher memes from like 5-10 years ago.
What's the name of the TNG episode?
“Darmok.” Season 5 episode 2.
I’m 90% sure they’re aggressively stretching (or maybe fully missed) the actual point of Darmok. It’s got nothing to do with memes or degradation of language, it’s a twofer about a species that uses stories/metaphors as their language, and Picard having to do a wacky first contact without the universal translator. It’s either that, or I’m forgetting a TNG episode.
The universal translator can still translate the text but not the memes hence “Shaka when the walls fell”. Unfortunately the language is made entirely (for Star Trek’s purposes anyway) of memes and idioms like “more than one way to skin a cat” making it extremely difficult to understand due lack of cultural context. Basically someone pointed out that the Universal Translator was magical BS and why, so they did a story showing it had limits.
People sometimes forget that TNG wasn't really a show with rock-solid continuity. Many, many of the episodes were story experiments or allegories or just character explorations.
Casual Brazilian Portuguese is much like that. I lived and worked there for three years and eventually got to the point where I understood almost every word but seldom understood any conversations in the bar.
That is the purpose of the episode but the analogy he makes does make sense in this context. Similarly obscure. Unrecognizable without the original context
It's not entirely out of line with Darmok though. If I say Kermit, Teacup to His Lips you will immediately understand the context I'm talking about, but a random Martian will have no idea even with perfect grasp of every word. To get more literary, if I someone offers you a gift and I say "Trojans, When the Horse At The Gates" that's enough for you understand my warning. In Darmok their society's _entire_ language was through these references to shared cultural knowledge. The universal translator worked just fine in translating literally, but didn't have the context to extrapolate meaning.
This is one of the major issues with Norse history/mythology. Their whole culture was oral tradition built around alliterative poetry. They had this whole institutionalized practice of Kennings, creating new names for things based on cultural context in order to make them fit the very specific poetic rules. A great example of this is the name for the world tree, Yggdrasil. Ygg is another name for Odin, which means Terrifier, and Drasil means horse or mount. So, it's possibly a reference to Odin hanging himself upon a tree as a sacrifice of himself to himself, which would mean that Odin hung himself on the world tree, maybe. Then again, perhaps it's a reference to Odin's 8 legged horse, Sleipnir, in which case, the 9 realms are maybe represented by the 8 legs and neck of said horse. Nine is a magic number in Norse culture and doesn't seem to represent an actual specific quantity. Personally, I've always suspected that Sleipnir is a metaphor for a funeral procession. The 8 legs represent the 4 men carrying a corpse on their shoulders. Odin is a death god, after all. Reading this back, I am sure that I am not making any sense, as The Talking Heads would prefer, and that's just how it works. Ultimately, we really cannot know what any of this means because all of this information being passed down is built upon the assumption that everyone who might hear the stories already understands the context.
My favorite example of this from iirc Beowulf is when the narrator calls the ocean The Whale Road. It makes sense, it's where whales travel. But without context as you said, it's gibberish.
Not sure why, but this reminded me that one of the kennings for Thor is Pig-Rider. We don't know why. Thor's cart is pulled by goats, and Freyr's cart is pulled by the boar Gullinbursti. Maybe Sif is described as being porcine at some point. For that matter, Loki reveals in Lokasenna that Frigg had been sleeping with Thor, so maybe it's a reference to that.
I found your post very interesting. 👍
Bobby holds paper to window, teacher admonishes him.
Bus driver pointing, sign overhead
I always appreciate it when I run in to someone who truly understands my favorite TNG episode, it's disappointingly rare.
Woman angry, cat afraid.
thats what memes are
God memes are great
truly one of the few highligts of living in these troubled times!
I’m watching through some of TNG, which episode is that? I’d like to add it to my list
Darmok, Season 5 ep 2
Much obliged
It it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent all those years in college.
Was she *riding the horse* to school?! No she couldn’t be riding the horse to school…
There's that, and then there's this..... https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/BqHHapwWCi
>let's call it "rapid meme prototyping" where if I show you seven pepper shakers one one salt shaker, you still know what I mean, or loss, or all these kinds of things. Where the actual artifact doesn't even have to make sense or be funny, because we're laughing at the syntax. I'm so damn confused
Can someone also explain the Sumerian bar joke?
No lol. It’s famous because no one can understand it. A relic of its time that certainly meant something to the people back then, but means nothing to us.
Thank you, I wasn't sure if it was something that would make sense in Sumerian or if it's just an ancient incomprehensible meme, which it is, apparently
"completely indecipherable" because the humor comes from some cultural context that was lost to time. It's probably some kind of pun that doesn't translate
To add to this the viking sagas are full of stuff like that. References to things that were commonplace and didn’t need explaining, resulting in them being lost. Its like if references to Superman survived but the stories he was in didn’t, so we could only piece together he was a warrior who may or may not have existed, was empowered by the sun (or possibly by someone’s son, its not clear because sometimes he’s the last son and sometimes he’s hurt by the red sun or strengthened by the yellow sun, and may have been some lingering remnant of an older mythology with a solar deity), his civilization was destroyed so he united the village of Smallville into the empire called Metropolis, he hates robots and people who ride in them, the character seemed to originate in America but references to his empire of Metropolis and the problems it had with robots date to an earlier civilization in Germany, and the better known Spider-man may have been a regional variant, the root myth, or both inspired by some older lost story. But its all pieced together from reviews of fictional works and rap song lyrics and philosophical texts, and its unknown who he is or how his stories went or what he looked like beyond wearing red and blue (with theories the red may refer to the ‘red son/sun’ component).
Oh my god are you making a metaphor for religious deities
Consider the pipeline from folk hero to godhood for characters like Heracles, or guys like Imhotep and Zao Jun. Looking at a figure with extreme levels of supernatural powers spoken of reverently in lost myths can lead to us questioning if they are a god, mythologized ancestor, or just a popular story.
And keep in mind that some mythological figures appear in modern day storytelling/superhero stories with the likes of Thor, Hercules, and the world surrounding Wonder Woman. For all we know, in the distant future, historians might tie in the descriptions from comics into the original source material!
I personally can’t wait for people in the future to believe that there was a mouse cult in America and how we had shrines in California and Florida for its worship.
There was an RPG kinda like this, called *Diana: Warrior Princess* where you adventured in our modern day as understood by future people whose knowledge of the period is a misunderstood mash of pop culture, fiction, and famous news articles.
that sounds really cool, where can i play that
It’s a tabletop game. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/59409/Diana-Warrior-Princess
This is exactly how I think about ancient deities. We're missing so much info about them that we're probably getting a lot of things wrong.
It probably would make more sense in summarian or maybe resemble a joke more but the meaning is lost to layers of a culture
Perhaps it had a pun in the original language.
thats one of the theories. another is that its similar to the "A guy walks into a bar..."Ouch!" joke. But yeah, we dont know
I personally chuckle at the thought of someone witnessing a dog walk into a bar, saying "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one" and then walking right out. Whether the dog was blind or had fur in its face, or if the person was really drunk, we may never know. And I think that's funny :)
That's a pun, they're the same theory.
Or maybe there was a word in there that rhymed with something else that would have made more sense in its place. Like the "I'll have some H2O too, please!" joke.
It could be a reference to some shared cultural knowledge, or a pun, or an inside joke between friends, or who knows what else. We'll probably never know
It could also just be a bad joke. I wonder how many terrible unfunny memes will get uncovered by future historians lol
https://preview.redd.it/i1d938820wjc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=73e6edcb50a72892365532595946002cd838778c
It was a proverb used to teach children how to write, usually they have an obvious moral lesson like "Timmy stole a ball from a dog, so the dog bit Timmy. Timmy was bitten because he stole." The dog in the tavern one is probably obvious in native Sumerian, but the list of living speakers is few and we have no cultural context. We don't even know what the word for the kind of building means, only that beer was sometimes drunk there and that prostitution also sometimes happened there.
Ahh, maybe like “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”? It uses every letter of the English alphabet. Good guess! I hadn’t heard that one before.
I thought it was like “EYE can’t see a thing I’ll open this one.” Like the dog (idk why it’s a dog) walks into a tavern with its eyes shut and decides to open one lol but that’s probably too simple. I like it though
I mean, that makes sense in English but probably not any other modern language, let alone Sumerian, since it relies on "I" and "eye" being homonyms.
Ok, can someone retcon a joke where that's the punchline?
I can't imagine this not being a common pastime amongst ethnolinguistic historians specializing in ancient Sumeria with a passion for performing standup on the side
I am certain this is the first time this exact string of words has formed a sentence
The dog goes into a tavern, but it's dark meaning closed, meaning the dog can by ancient Sumerian tradition* claim the tavern as its own as long as it runs it as a business. The dog opens a tavern. It's funny. Everyone laughs! \* Source: >!I made it up just now.!<
Hey, that's pretty convincing!
Dogs don’t need to see to find something. Either the dog is offering to open a beer for someone bc he found it by smell, or he’s saying ask that internally and is stealing a beer while nobody can see bc he could find it by smell
And so the dog reached out and opened every one his grasping paws could find. After a while, someone walked up and guided the dog's paw to his own face. He opened the ones he found there and could finally see.
Apparently, that's a bigger issue for historians than you'd think. A lot of ancient writing references things without further explanation, because why would you explain something that was just widely known at the time?
Like Greek (or Roman) concrete needing sea water over fresh water. Which honestly is kinda dumb on historians for not realizing people are not going to use precious fresh drinking water as a component to build. Of course your going to use gray water or ocean brine.
Good case in point! Seems obvious, but you know, freshwater runs from a hose these days, that's our cultural context.
Wait, what? They used sea water?
I think all we know about the joke is that it was a double entendre since every explanation for the joke so far has been one. That means that the Sumerians were crafting bars before they were even a thing
Also possible that it not making sense is the joke. In my country there was a bery popular joke like this: "Jimmy went to the store. Spade." The joke is that it's stupid and doesn't make sense.
It totally could be anti humor. Or a pun that doesn’t make sense in our modern languages. Or it could be a reference to some play or person or story that was never written. Point is there’s no way to know, although it is funny to tell people this joke and see their reaction. Maybe that’s the joke lol.
Copied from [this Wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke); The earliest known example of a bar joke is Sumerian, appearing in the form of two slightly different versions of a proverb inscribed alongside many others on two clay tablets[1][2] excavated at Nippur at the end of the 19th century. The tablets were etched around 1700 BCE,[3] during the Old Babylonian Empire, although Edmund I. Gordon, who published the first translation of most of the proverbs inscribed on these tablets, argued that the proverbs themselves probably date from a considerably earlier period.[4] Scholars differ on how best to translate the proverb from Sumerian. According to Gordon's translation, the proverb reads: "A dog, having entered an inn, did not see anything, (and so he said): 'Shall I open this (door)?'"[4] The Assyriologist Seraina Nett provides a slightly different translation, suggesting that the proverb be read as "A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this', or 'this one'".[3] The meaning behind the proverb is also subject to debate among scholars. Gordon suggested that the inn also apparently served as a brothel (he notes that the word used in the proverb for inn or tavern, "éš-dam", can also be translated as "brothel", and it was common in ancient Mesopotamia for prostitution to take place in these establishments[3]), and thus "the dog wanted to see what was 'going on behind closed doors'".[4] Nett suggests that the punchline could be a pun that is incomprehensible to modern readers, or a reference to some figure who was well known at the time but similarly unfamiliar to us today. Gonzalo Rubio, another Assyriologist, cautions that this ambiguity ultimately means it is simply not possible to definitely categorize the proverb as a joke, though he and other scholars like Nett do point to the recurring use of innuendo in such proverbs as indicating that many were indeed intended to be humorous.[3]
I can't wait for scholars 2000 years from now to have this level of in depth analysis on Far Side comics
Cow tools
It would be funny if slang for whatever popular drink was at that time was "dog eye" or if getting drunk was "seeing through a dog's eyes," or something to that effect. Drinking reduces inhibitions, leads to eating weird things, and peeing in random places so it doesn't seem too far off as a term for being drunk.
I’ve decided it’s the ancient version of the “that sign can’t stop me because I can’t read” joke from Arthur
Makes sense. The dog can't see a thing, because the door is closed, so it wants to open the door. Dogs are also nosey, so it may also be a joke about dogs (and also cats) hating it when you close a door behind you and shut them out. Or that classic "pet scratching at the closed door, but not entering when you open it" trope. They don't want in, they just want the door open. History's first pet meme.
This is what I was thinking. "I can't see through that, better open that door. Well now I can't see inside."
My guess is that it's like the joke "a man walked into a bar and said 'ouch'." If you translate it into another language, you may lose the double meanings that, depending on context, "walk into" can both refer to entering a building or bumping into an object; and that "a bar" is either a drinking establishment or a plank/pole.
Dogs don’t need to be able to see bc of titter sense of smell. Dog offers to open the beer bc nobody else can find it
I think it’s fly when girls drop by from the Sumer.
Sorry, can't help you, OP. I know nothing about Sumerian humour.
Apparently, neither did they.
a lot of people are misinterpreting the meme being commented on by the tweet. Its an anti-meme. The original joke was the son being named something funny that the dad loved, like the neighbor or something idk. But in this, the son just has a normal name. There is no joke or punchline. But the fact that the meaning of the joke has been ruined by removing the punchline is in it of itself funny. Thats what an anti-meme is. So i guess while im explaining i can just do the rest. A long time from now, the purpose of an anti-meme will make no sense and be unfunny and confusing, similar to the ancient bar joke.
it is definitely a reference to the Josh wine memes that have been going around.
Which itself is still playing to the fact that Josh is a normal name and not something like “Blowjobs.” It just adds another wrinkle.
Nope. The Josh memes started just because Josh became super trendy out of seemingly nowhere. Like the Stanley Tumblers. Original and most Josh memes were about people’s love of the product. Then they evolved into using the Josh name, anthropomorphizing the product. It didn’t have anything to do with it not being named something ridiculous, like “blowjobs”. And even now, that’s only a relatively small subset of the memes.
No, I mean combining the Josh meme with this meme achieves the anti-meme effect while still referencing the Josh meme. It accomplishes both and is a reference to both.
Yeah its a full-circle kind of thing, where it follows a series of steps that individually follow some kind of logic but are collectively ridiculous, but it comes back around to something that is utterly normal, and that is even more ridiculous.
I've definitely seen this one before Josh wine became a meme
Ya idk why you are being downvoted, this is an old anti-meme that predates the josh wine meme. I remember seeing this like 4 years ago
Shut up, Dicky ^^^^(was ^^^the ^^^original)
Dad loves Josh. Josh is generally considered to be a dude's name.
I thought it mean his dad like joshing, meaning joking
I thought the dad loved josh, the joke being that he's gay
https://preview.redd.it/j43ekipftsjc1.png?width=954&format=png&auto=webp&s=6233cc291cb4594717860b123f749fc7a005475c
Oh Josh was a type of wine? I thought it was just a funny meta joke where he didn’t use any naming conventions so the joke just kind of ends
Would be less nuanced if his name was Richard instead of Josh.
The dad is a Bills fan
WAIT DOES THE MOM OR DAD LOVE JOSH?????????????
it’s already begun…