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Comment by zach_garwood | Hacker News Reader

Never heard it. What does it mean? Is it like a Slack shortcut?

In one of the call of duty games, you attend a funeral and when you reach the casket, an onscreen prompt asks you to press F to pay your respects. This took on a life of its own, and now on Reddit threads you’ll see people saying press f to pay respects when someone was figuratively killed.

Wow, okay, and they claimed it's not an obscure reference, but you have to have played a certain level in a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what it means? Maybe obscure doesn't mean what I think it means.

It's a popular meme so you don't have to have played the game or even really be much of a gamer. You'd have come across it at some point hanging out on social media.

You may be surprised both by

1. how many people don’t “hang out” in social media culture, and only circulate on there with family and peers using everyday idioms and emoji/abbreviation; if they use social media at all,

2. how many different, disjoint online cultures there are. Many things widely circulated on reddit and adjacent communities may never surface on some FB mom’s group

People maintain much more different lives from each other than you seem to assume, even among those that who are “terminally online” or that “hang out on social media”

It's pretty safe to assume that almost all of genz and gen alpha has come across the "F" meme at least once. Can't say about older folk.

I was just pointing out that knowledge of the meme wasn't as obscure as having actually played the game, which would be a much more limited audience than even just reddit users.

As with most idioms, most of the people who reference it have no clue what the origin of the expression is. Knowing the etymology of something is not a requirement for understanding what it means.

I've never played that game, but the F in the chat thing is popular on twitch. No wonder, since it's a huge (nonsensical) chat platform.

"Break the ice" was coined by Shakespeare, but the vast majority of people who use the phrase probably didn't read that play.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who have used the "press F" meme without knowing the original context too.

My regular friend group who uses that phrase have all read the play, some even who have performed it. I'm sure I'm not alone, but then again, I have the intuition to find people with similar life experiences and religion.

>Wow, okay, and they claimed it's not an obscure reference, but you have to have played a certain level in a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what it means?

You just had to have played that game, and the game isn't obscure. Call of Duty is one of the largest franchises on earth and I would consider it akin to something like a Marvel movie in popularity. If someone referenced a meme from a marvel movie, I wouldn't describe it as obscure.

I've played a Call of Duty game and watched several Marvel movies, and no one is claiming either is obscure. What I am saying is that just because you hang out in forums where this is a common phrase does not mean it has exposure to the wider world. It is unknown to 99% of the world, by definition obscure.

I would argue that there is a 100:1 ratio of people who know know what the reference means vs. having actually played the game. Maybe even closer to 1,000:1. Kinda like how lots of people know the “World Series” is a baseball tournament, but most people have never watched it.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/f-in-the-chat

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