Can’t believe no one’s mentioned this…
HAVE A NICE DAY!
Wouldn’t the moral panics of the time count as memes, albeit ones that reproduce among gullible adults?
ISTR there was a real worry among the suburban parents in the 1980s about Satan worshippers kidnapping children, and about D&D making us Satan worshippers, as absurd as both of those sound.
The “made you look” game.
You point at something off in the distance and say “Look at that [whatever].” If the person turned their head to look, you somehow became better than them.
I <3 ny
Wearing green on Thursday.
When I went out on Halloween in the 1960’s, we gleefully accepted anything anyone put in our bags. Candy apples, popcorn balls, anything. By the 1970’s hospital emergency rooms were offering to X-ray candy for free because of all the needles, poison, etc. that sick perverts were putting in the candy. I don’t ever recall there ever actually being any adulterated candy, but it turned into a nationwide thing pretty fast.
And also during that era, I don’t think I was in any bar near any college in the U.S. that didn’t have this scrawled somewhere in the men’s room.
“God is dead” - Nietzsche
“Nietzsche is dead” - God
It was a hair pulling “game.” We said “Made you look / made you stare / now I get to pull your hair.” Followed by a hair pulling and nasty fight with your sibling.
We played the Slug Bug game in Idaho, but I don’t think we ever called it that. The first person to spy a VW said “Beetle yellow” or whatever color it was and got to slug the other person on the upper arm. We also did the finger circle/slug “game” but I don’t remember what we called it. None of the names I’ve seen in this thread ring a bell. This would have been in the 60s.
Gomer Pyle voice for any situation unexpected:
Surprise! Surprise!
Or “Shazam!” I once said that in the Gomer Pyle voice and caused a math professor to have a mild fit of the giggles when he demonstrated a neat trick of some sort while running through an example on the chalkboard.
It took Gomer for me to realize it wasn’t pronounced the way I thought after seeing it in Captain Marvel comics, which would have been “Shazz-um.”
A couple from junior high (if you did these the “wrong way” you were not masculine/feminine-ie gay):
Boys carry their books under their arms; girls carry them cradled in front
Boys wash their extremities before their torsos; girl wash their torso first
Also-any number of old superstitions could be considered memes
“Step on a crack-break your mama’s back”
“Three on a match”
Yeen was always a mystery to me; I’m delighted to hear that he apparently can still be seen in the AMES building stairwells.
It truly is the oldest trick in the book.
Fruit Loops! I never got their association with homosexuality, but assholes would collect them. Which was totally gay.
Another from Laugh-in: “Here come da judge!”
An aspirin held between the knees will prevent pregnancy.
My sister and I used to play that game on long road trips when we were kids, but we hollered “Beaver!” instead. I remember my folks asking us why we hollered “Beaver!” every so often.
More…
Shit happens!
Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.
Jesus is coming back…and boy is he pissed.
Synapse leap: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
For that matter, the original Christian fish, to which the Darwin fish was a response.
Speaking of religious-themed memes, a big one in the late 1970s was the motto “I found it” on stickers and buttons, alluding to Christian salvation or conversion; a Jewish group somewhere came up with the response, “We never lost it”.
I’m equally delighted; what’s more I just moved back into San Diego! Well, greater SD, actually–Escondido to be precise. I’m definitely making a campus visit soon and will check this out for sure. I wonder if that dragon is still visible in the basement layer of York Hall (Undergraduate Science Building to you and me).
This reminds me of another meme–wasn’t there also a “Frodo Lives” graffito somewhere in USB?
(BTW which building was AMES? I don’t remember any building going by that name; could it be you’re thinking of the Applied Physics and Math? I imagine that’s been renamed since we were there.)