“It’s Lit!”: Memes, Linguistic Play, and Academic Terminology

As a first-generation immigrant who first grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese, which then became superseded by English as my entire family struggled to learn the ins and outs of this truly ridiculous language, reading student papers submitted by those wrestling with the language will always provoke a bit of extra compassion from me. Working toward a doctorate’s degree in English may be no small feat, but attempting to spell things like femininity or choosing between discrete versus discreet will always give me pause. These difficulties persist even when my entire dissertation project revolves around scrutinizing discursive representations of Victorian femininity, analyzing discrete case studies across a number of significant texts while discreetly counting how many commas I’ve used in any given paragraph so far.

(Four. There are four commas in the previous paragraph. You’re welcome.)

In recent years, linguistic studies and heightened awareness toward the use of vernacular, such as African American Vernacular English — more commonly known as “ebonics” — has changed the approach some academics take toward writing voice and line-by-line edits. With ever-more inventive uses of language on the rise, taking root in dictionaries from popular culture, and making it big on the Broadway stage, one has to wonder – do things like sentence diagraming and telling the difference between a preposition and a proposition still matter?

Everyone has an opinion, it seems, and everyone has a place to showcase it.

As it turns out, however, academic linguists and those in charge of adding words to dictionaries aren’t the only ones in charge of different practical acquisitions of language. In my years of teaching, memes have gone from inconsequential pastiches or pieces of pointed satirical critique to genuine artifacts of cultural meaning. Seeing as memes have an extremely high turnover rate, since they live and die at the mercy of the ever-changing interests of those who make social media — or the internet more generally — a place to do most of their reading, a wide majority of these variations on linguistic and visual play have sputtered out after fifteen minutes of fame. What is truly incredible, though, is just how much we can all pick up from a single glance at a seemingly nonsensical image and a string of text.

(Take a look at the header image, for example. Can you decipher it?)

Spider Georg lurking out in his cave could teach students a thing or two about statistical outliers. There existed similarities between Craving that Mineral and Lik the Bred, but only one of those could instruct the casual internet browser about iambic diameter. The difference between a “Thanks for Coming to my TED Talk” textual meme and an “And in this essay, I will prove that” meme can teach a student the difference between a discussion-oriented conference paper full of theoretical ideas, and a tightly-focused essay with a clear and specific thesis statement.

(Will memes ever one day attain the status of academic speech and writing? Who knows, and who is to say? For the time being, if that previous paragraph reads more like gibberish, feel free to consult this database of old and current memes, which works just as well as any other encyclopedic resource.)

Personally, I have lost count of the number of times I wished I could grade student papers with GIFs or memes. It was a student who taught me the meaning of the phrase “It’s Lit!” and it was a student who told me they would “take the L but come back better and stronger” after a failed reading quiz. The wish to write dissertation chapters purely in memes, shortened speech, “unprofessional” language, and reaction images, has become a common refrain among myself and my peers, when words have become too difficult for the day.

Recently, my adviser encouraged me to stop thinking so hard about getting the gist of my argument just right on the first time. “Just play,” they suggested, hands moving around in space as if through the sandbox — or litterbox? — of mental debris that came from several weeks of cutthroat editing and agonizing over every single sentence. Yes, the dissertation is a serious project, but one can enjoy the process of working with language and generating ideas in a way that is uniquely our own, even when building on the shoulders of scholars and speakers who have come before.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.