this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It is literally a meme how shitty Ohio is.

You can say this about a dozen US states.

Ohio's notable because of the sheer number of people who still live there, unlike New Hampshire or South Dakota or West Virginia or Oklahoma. But its right in line with your Florida and Texas and Pennsylvania, in that its cultivated itself as a lodestone for exploitable ecology and economic activity. And now it has to fight tooth and nail to keep the increasingly irate large public workforce submissive and pliant in order to impose the next indignity.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But their point is that kids literally use the word "ohio" in speech when they need a word that means "cringeworthy, awkward, weird, bad". Unlike the other states.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I... guess I could maybe have been more clear, but I was using 'meme' more in the original, Richard Dawkins, academic sense of the term, that a meme is a kind of major, self-propogating idea, somewhat analogous to how genes propogate through biological populations and are subject to something analgous to 'natural selection'.

...

I guess uh yeah, fun fact if you didn't know, that's the actual etymological origin of 'meme' as a word, Dawkins coined and popularized it in 'The Selfish Gene'.

https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/

So, you could say it is a meme that meme just means 'internet joke', if you switch between the different meanings of the word.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meme

The Selfish Gene came out in I think the 70s or 80s?

The more academic meaning was the original meaning, and then roughly during the early 2000s, the broad public usage of the internet resulted in the emergence of the second, 'internet joke' meaning... something, some joke image or phrase would 'become a meme' when it had spread around, gone viral, to the point that it was well known in certain subcultures... and then the meme was said to have 'broken containment' when it got to the point that people outside of the subculture had been exposed to and were familiar with it.

...

But anyway yeah, a signifcant element of a subculture or vernacular literally is a meme, and you are correct, I was trying to emphasize that Ohio is so uniquely bad that Gen Z/A has just made Ohio into an adjective for roughly 'cringe'.

(Possibly another factor at play here is that Millenials so overused 'cringe' that the word 'cringe' became cringe itself, thus a new, near-equivalent but distinct word was needed?)

Perhaps another example along these lines is 'borked'.

'Borked' now basically means that some thing or process is poorly constructed, gone about in a ramshackle, haphazard way, got fumbled, its all fucked up and broken and doesn't/didn't work.

The origin of this term is from the attempted appointment of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court back under Reagan in '82, which uh, didn't go so well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/borked

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bork