{"id":33228,"date":"2015-10-18T03:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-10-18T07:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33228"},"modified":"2015-10-17T16:51:32","modified_gmt":"2015-10-17T20:51:32","slug":"is-that-how-that-meme-started-ermahgerd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/18\/is-that-how-that-meme-started-ermahgerd\/","title":{"rendered":"Is that how that meme started? ERMAHGERD!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They&#8217;re not quite as common as they once were, but the <a href=\"https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2015\/10\/16\/tweens-are-smarter-than-you-th.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;ERMAGERD!&#8221; girl<\/a> can still be found in lots of odd corners of the interwebz:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/ermahgerd-meme-maggie-goldenberger-012.jpg\" alt=\"ermahgerd-meme-maggie-goldenberger-012\" width=\"410\" height=\"606\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-33229\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/ermahgerd-meme-maggie-goldenberger-012.jpg 410w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/ermahgerd-meme-maggie-goldenberger-012-101x150.jpg 101w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/ermahgerd-meme-maggie-goldenberger-012-406x600.jpg 406w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 410px) 100vw, 410px\" \/>Maggie Goldenberger and her fourth- and fifth-grade pals used to amuse themselves by dressing up in weird clothes, doing crazy stuff to their hair, and posing for polaroids holding funny objects and making weird faces. Years later, Goldenberger uploaded some of her favorites to her <em>Myspace<\/em> and <em>Facebook<\/em> accounts, which led to Jeff Davis, who she didn&#8217;t know, posting it to <em>Reddit<\/em>, where a Redditor called Plantlife ganked it and captioned it with &#8220;GERSBERMS. MAH FRAVRIT BERKS&#8221; &mdash; and a meme was born.<\/p>\n<p>The meme was pretty much perfect, a super-awkward tween frozen in a moment of crazy nerding-out over some super-awkward tween books. Combine that with the wordplay in which every vowel sound is &#8220;strangulated into &#8216;er'&#8221; and you get a meme that has refused to die, year after year.<\/p>\n<p>Darryn King&#8217;s <em>Vanity Fair<\/em> profile of Goldenberger and history of the ERMAHGERD is a fascinating read. Most interesting to me is the fact that the meme&#8217;s premise &mdash; that the retainer-wearing, squinch-faced <em>Goosebumps<\/em>-clutching kid in the photo was a gormless, awkward tween with no idea of how weird she looked &mdash; is totally, perfectly wrong. The picture was posed, created by a savvy, funny, witty tween with more smarts than tweens are credited with by an unfair world, who created a genuinely comic character that inspired millions of people to riff on it. Not bad for a nine- or ten-year-old. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They&#8217;re not quite as common as they once were, but the &#8220;ERMAGERD!&#8221; girl can still be found in lots of odd corners of the interwebz: Maggie Goldenberger and her fourth- and fifth-grade pals used to amuse themselves by dressing up in weird clothes, doing crazy stuff to their hair, and posing for polaroids holding funny [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28],"tags":[262,58,29],"class_list":["post-33228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","tag-culture","tag-internet","tag-photography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8DW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33231,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33228\/revisions\/33231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}