What in God’s Green Earth is the story behind this meme? It seems to be board-specific and based on The Office somehow, but I don’t have a clue what it actually means.
I asked the same question when I restarted here. Short version: a poster decided that phrase would be the new internet “rolling on the floor laughing” and started using it to encourage others here to use it. It didn’t take. At all.
I’ve never used it myself, but I have to admit it makes me giggle only because Chessic Sense’s post made me laugh, so yeah, I guess you had to be there.
This pit thread is also of note. There have been other threads.
eg http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=638454
eg http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=702582
He’s still trying after over a year of doing it and getting no favorable response.
Of course it didn’t take, and that’s about the only useful lesson to come out of the whole thing. A single person can rarely, if ever, determine how language usage will evolve, even from within a relatively small discourse community such as this one. The tides that shape language are much larger than the conceits of one individual. Of course, it was even that much less likely to happen since he announced his explicit purpose from the start, and then executed his plan with clumsy overkill.
Thanks for the clarifications. All this time I thought the phrase was “Lets go the the quarry and throw up there”, and I was all like, “Who the hell would want to do THAT?”
TWO years. You’d think like most right-minded Dopers, he’d clue in to how annoying his oft-repeated phrase is, and how much goodwill it burns.
Regards,
Munch
It’s a form of trolling that is permitted. For some reason.
This is incorrect.
I don’t think it is actually trolling since it is a kind of purposeful language experiment. I don’t think it makes any* sense* either, but it doesn’t get under my skin like some other posters I guess.
This is true. I wince before reading his posts, and sometimes even avoid them because he has lost so much respect in my eyes.
Well, on this board at least, it’s not really a meme.
A meme, according to the ever-reliable Merriam-Webster, is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
Here on the Dope, the quarry thing is confined to essentially one person. He wants it to become a meme here, but has gained basically no traction in his unstinting effort to promote its use.
MODERATOR NOTE:
Let’s be careful here to comment on the post and not throw stones at the poster. If you have a problem with the poster, that needs to be in the Pit.
Creed says it to Jim in the episode where Jim buys his parents’ house (without telling Pam first). Apparently Creed lives nearby and throwing stuff in the quarry is how he spends his free time.
Hmm. Gotta give him fair credit, though, for trying to embiggen the language with a perfectly cromulent idiom.
The meme might have gotten more traction if the originator’s user name was Creed.
(How can I argue with this and not dig myself in deeper? And she even left it open for a stone throwing/quarry joke! Nope, discretion is the better part of valor…) …Okay. Sorry.
Maybe for April Fools you can rename The Pit to The Quarry.