A thorough investigation of the Doge meme

A few days ago, I saw someone comment "Much thin, such cloth, wow" on YouTube, as a response to the Surface Laptop ad.

I have seen crypto geeks speak this peculiar language before. I asked around, and found out this originates from Dogecoin, affectionately called Dogespeak. Evidently, Dogecoin's original announcement used such language, and it quickly caught on. Today, Dogecoin is worth $125 million.

The Dogecoin community invented many other popular crypto phrases, such as "To the moon!". Today, it's not just a Dogecoin thing - it's a general crypto thing.

But, of course, Dogecoin's developer didn't invent this (Sorry, Dogecoin fanboys). Indeed, it was a pretty popular meme on the internet in 2013, which is what inspired Dogecoin in the first place.

The classic Doge meme consists of three attributes -

1. A picture of a Shiba Inu dog.
2. The peculiar language with short sentences always beginning with a modifier.
3. In colourful Comic Sans fonts.

Of course, there very many variations of the Doge meme, but that's the classic form.

The meme came to prominence when a bunch of 4chan trolls co-ordinated a flood on the Subreddit r/MURICA.

You'll notice that the text hadn't set in then - that came later. There's no real documentation of the first time someone added text to the meme, but it was probably some time in August 2013.

However, we do know where the colourful Comic Sans originated, on a Tumblr in 2012.

However, the real origin of the Doge dates all the way back to 2010, three years before it was turned into a meme. It's all in this inconspicuous Reddit photo submission titled "LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKEN DOGE" - https://www.reddit.com/r/ads/comments/dsxz3/lmbo_look_this_fukken_doge/.

The original image isn't uploaded anymore, but as you may have guessed it, it was this photo -

So, the Shiba Inu and the word "doge" were set back in 2010. Then came the colourful Comic Sans in 2012, the 4chan troll in August 2013, then came the language shortly after, then came the memes, and then came Dogecoin in December 2013.

By the way, there's heated debate about how Doge is pronounced. There's the Dohzh camp and the Dohg camp. This matter remains unresolved to this very day, and is much too grave a matter to ever be resolved.