Meme: An idea or element of social behaviour passed on through generations in a culture, especially by imitation. The word came from a combination of Gene and the Greek word ‘mimetismos’ which means something immitated.

I’ve always loved the internet and all its absurdities and strangeness, but there is one part that makes it much more interesting to watch and that’s the memes. An internet Meme is an idea that is passed along through the internet growing more and more popular until it reaches some sort of critical mass at which time it slowly dies out and fades back, though rarely ever going away completely.

Every culture has their own memes, like Brother Sharp and Sister Feng or ‘My dad is LiGang!’ in China or Pictures in extreme situations in Eastern Europe/Russia. In this series I’ll try to introduce some of the Western memes and give a brief description of where they came from and how they evolved.

Today we’ll look at a lovely meme which I’ve always enjoyed because I like Owls, strange little animals with very expressive faces, their expressive faces is what created the ability for this meme to thrive, it started, as many memes in the west have, on the boards of ether 4chan or something awful and grew quickly.

The 'O RLY' Owl and the 'YA RLY' response

This meme started with the Owls above, O RLY was used in response to someone’s comments which you didn’t believe were true and the YA RLY was obviously used to say “Yes they are true!”

'NO WAI!!!' owl and a Mexican Owl followed after

Like all Memes it slowly startd to mutate and change as the cast of characters expanded and even grew more international in style. Soon any picture that showed someone looking confused, doubting or just plain stupid was being used to create these pictures all over the internet and a meme was born!