An Elegant Sufficiency, or the Curious Case of a Victorian Meme (2018)

Anecdotical of course, but I remember "memes" existing in localized/regional form long before the Internet was publicly available. If we had to have a name for it, we said it was an "insider joke"[1].

This was usually small silly stuff like words or phrases that were repeated, sometimes situational and back-and-forth, or callbacks to earlier events that made a mark somehow.

As a small and silly example, I remember that around the part of the city where I grew up, for a while we had this thing where when someone asked why we were going to do something (like going to some other neighborhood), instead of the real reason (like going to get ice cream) we would all answer with fake exasperation "it's about the principle!!"[2].

It's just stupid, fun bonding stuff teenagers do, most of which is probably forgotten when you grew up and absurdist humor becomes a bit less interesting.

I remember that the word "meme" actually was invented to, so it seemed to me, describe exactly this phenomenon, and only years later the Internet meme superseded that more general meaning to something more specific.

[1] Although this was Germany in the 90s, we literally used the English words "insider joke". There's a lot of expressions synthesized using English words in common usage in Germany. [2] This one actually in German.

> How did this concept proliferate and propagate without the internet, or at least written records?

I'm perplexed by the author's perplexity. Isn't it obvious that short sayings like this (and other similar things, e.g. children's playground rhymes) propagate orally?

> But the universe must have decided that this wasn’t good enough, and presented me with the phrase the very next day

"Baader-Meinhof phenomenon". You'll see this name again soon.

This term kind of reminds me of an "joke" that's usually transmitted orally in my country. I can only assume that the origin of the meme may have something in common. A translation of the joke would be like:

After lunch, the farmer boy tells his mom:

- My belly is stuffed!

His mom replies:

- That's so impolite! This Friday when you have dinner on the city with your rich uncle, use elegant words like "I'm satisfied".

- Ok, mom.

Friday, after dinner, the boy says:

- My satisfied is stuffed!

This reminds me of the Civil War meme "Mister, here's your mule" [1]. With the meme supply limited by word-of-mouth, I can only imagine how riotously funny both of these must have been to those at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here%27s_your_mule

I came across this article when googling to see if a variant upon it from my own family was a quotation!

I’m curious about this and will ask my mother who picked it up from hers, and she from hers and so on. I’ve even used it myself as a kind of victorian throwback pleasantry. It’s a meme rather than a mimic I’m sure. Just being polite when served by those close, together with a whole lot of other cultural context. A descendant on her side had a fruit and veges shop in old Brighton when the royal pavillion attracted aristocrats and so on. Later in deptford, bombed during WWII and surrounded by relative poverty. Stiff upper lip and lower class manners mixed with stoicism. I’d look in the east end and Kent for English context.

This is a meme in my family as well. I always took it as a mockery of affectatious formal speech. I never thought of it as a jab at the nouveau riche let alone of the Victorian era, but it seems plausible.

My family uses "I'm sufficiently suffonsified!", but I've never heard anyone else use it. Super curious where it came from.

Interesting. In my family it was always "I've had an _ample_ sufficiency."