THE CHATTER

How internet memes and inside jokes create a private language that makes us feel like we belong

‘He walks slowly, light in the shoulders, heavy in the hips. Six feet of casual swagger.’ An ode to Timothy Olyphant

My friends and I observe a simple rule when playing a board or video game that is a sort of informal statute that incontestably governs our play.

This is how it works: Because we’re in friendly company, and because we’re lenient and easy- going, we will allow — within reason — some latitude around game moves, rather than follow to the absolute letter official regulations — as one might in, say, a professional championship or match in which cash has been wagered. If, for instance, we’re playing chess, we won’t insist that a particular piece be committed to once it has been touched by a player, as tournament rules dictate; if someone goes to move a bishop and suddenly realizes they’ll be mated if they don’t dispatch a pawn, we will afford them the licence to change their mind without penalty. It’s a game; it’s supposed to be fun. It would be a poor friend who’s militantly pedantic.

The only thing is, should you choose to bend the rules and emerge victorious, it wouldn’t be an ordinary win. It would be “bananas.”

Bananas was coined almost a decade ago by my friends Tim and Laura White in Ottawa, where they routinely played heated matches of Scrabble into the smallest hours of the night. One evening, in a dead heat

mid- game, Laura placed a few low- scoring tiles before it dawned on her that she had another, much better word at her disposal — “bananas” — that would touch on a Triple Word Score tile for a triumph- securing 27 points. Tim let Laura remove her previous letters and play “bananas” in its place to win the game, as any reasonable husband would. But the victory proved Pyrrhic; Laura, though she had made this move with her opponent’s permission, was unconvinced that it was right. It was a qualified win, a win with an asterisk. It was ... bananas.

Among the people who play games with Tim and Laura with any regularity, “bananas” is widely accepted and understood. Did you think the name of the third single from U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby was “One Love” at a crucial impasse in Trivial Pursuit? We’d let you take it — close enough to the real title, “One,” and a common misnomer — but it’s bananas, especially if you’re playing for a wedge. Foot slipped over the line as you land a strike at the bowling alley? The points are yours, but if you win, it’s a bit bananas. Someone in our company need only whisper this potent word and its meaning is unambiguously comprehended.

Bananas has become, indispensably, a part of the language of our group.

There is something specifically pleasurable about this shared knowledge, and about the feeling of fraternity that’s stimulated by using a private — yet communal — shorthand. Like an inside joke, “bananas” has become an idiom of friends, and it seems special, precious, because of the currency it enjoys in familiar company and the meaninglessness it continues to have outside the group. The word is appealing for what it means to us and only us — and knowing what it means confers to us the feeling of belonging to something.

Inside jokes, references, and other forms of shared knowledge among friends can be compelling psychological intoxicants. They can reduce feelings of alienation among individuals exposed to them; they help establish a rapport, a sense of fellowship, that curbs loneliness and buttresses social bonds.

A psychological study from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 found that such jokes, references, and private language games “have a powerful interpersonal effect such that they function as a purposeful and humorous I-sharing moment,” allowing people to reveal themselves to one another, which can “decrease feelings of existential isolation and increase liking and social desirability of others.” When we share a language with those close to us, we feel both closer to them and better about ourselves. It’s no surprise then that these little friend phrases and idioms tend to crop up as if conjured in any close-knit social group.

Last October, a 20- yearold cosplayer named Kat posted a fifteen-second video to the popular, Vine- like social media app Tik Tok in which she danced and lipsynced to “Mia Khalifa,” an obscure pop song and diss track by the group ILOVEFRIDAY. Almost overnight, Kat’s moves became a kind of ironic dance craze across the platform, inspiring tens of thousands of uncannily precise imitations.

The song’s main refrain, meanwhile — “hit or miss / I guess they never miss, huh?” — became something like a rallying cry for Tik Tok users, as Kat’s 15-second interpretation suddenly seemed more ubiquitous than the original song. By December, videos had been posted using the hashtag # hitormiss more than 250 million times. If that number seems rather high, I direct you to an hourlong compilation of people doing the dance on Youtube.

Where this gets strange — or I suppose stranger — is that soon after Kat’s dance when viral, the refrain itself moved offline. “A Tik Tok trend is probably why you’ve been hearing the phrase ‘ hit or miss’ yelled in public lately,” reads the headline to an article in Business Insider late last year. The article reports that the runaway success of the dance “has inspired an IRL challenge, where people yell the phrase and wait for a response.” The purpose of the challenge isn’t arbitrary: It’s a way for the initiated to find others like them. One Tik Tok user, Insider writes, “decided to see if it could be seen as a ‘ secret handshake’ for the community,” and wandered into a Marshalls to test the theory. “He went to a Marshalls and yelled out ‘ hit or miss.’ Someone responded with ‘ I guess I’ll never miss ya.’”

The secret handshake principle is interesting, because it works exactly the same way as any inside joke or reference. It would be as if I walked around board game cafés saying “bananas” to see if anyone had ever played with my friends.

The difference is that while “bananas” is a term coined expressly by and for my friends, and therefore exists within the confines of a familiar community, “hit or miss” gained currency online, on a platform where one’s identity is often mysterious and “friends” can be spread out all over the world. Knowing what “hit or miss” means, and finding others who know what it means too, activates the same pleasure centres of the brain hit by any inside joke or reference — it’s the same communal shorthand, just shared and spread in different ways. Part of the joy of “hit or miss,” and the reason the dance became an internet phenomenon, is the sensation it confers of belonging. You belong to a group that uses and loves Tik Tok.

This is to some extent true of all internet memes — because what is an internet meme, really, if not an inside joke whose knowing group extends to an online multitude that shares nothing else in common?

Social media is uniquely capable of disseminating jokes and references and of conferring on its users a little of that community feeling, but one that tens of thousands, sometimes millions, can share in the same kind of private language enjoyed by friends on a drastically smaller scale. Ironically, it may be precisely the isolating effect of social media — all those horrible feelings of FOMO and not getting enough likes — that makes users all the more desperate for any sense of fellowship and solidarity.

Platforms such as Tik Tok bring i ndividuals together in ways never before possible, and we may need the glue of a private language to hold us there more comfortably. When we share memes, we feel all the closer to those who get it — and perhaps feel a touch better about ourselves. And yes, the sense of community this creates is a little bit bananas.