Talk:The dog ate my homework

A fact from The dog ate my homework appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 1 November 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the earliest known variant of "The dog ate my homework" as an excuse dates to 1905?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/The dog ate my homework.

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Nrgrams

Just for background http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dog+ate+my+homework%2C+ate+my+homework&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share= Rich Farmbrough, 01:45, 5 November 2012 (UTC).[reply]

Huh, interesting. Certainly confirms what's in the article. I guess it's not a reliable source -- is it? Herostratus (talk) 06:54, 5 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, since I already used one in the article (albeit one that was cited by one of the sources), and it's generated automatically by software run by a notable and well-respected company, I don't see why not. I think for "Running to Stand Still", a similar result of Google News archival searches was accepted to support the contention that usage of the phrase went way up after that song (see note 50) when that was the DYK hook.

Although something like that is not specifically mentioned on the page, I think that would count as permissible research since it can easily be replicated and requires no special skills to either do so or understand. Daniel Case (talk) 16:23, 5 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a meme

It's not a meme, and consequently it should be removed from that category, and I will absent objections.

It's an idiom. There are like a couple hundred idioms in Category:English-language idioms, and none of them are memes. There's nothing in particular to this one that Best friends forever or The captain goes down with the ship and so on don't have.

Or... maybe all, some, or most English-language idioms are also memes. In that case, we'd need a subcategory of Category:Memes for them... maybe "Idiomatic saying memes" or something, and we could put this article in that category alone with all, some, or most of the other articles in Category:English-language idioms. I'm not going to do that because I don't agree with that, but it's not unreasonable for someone to argue for that if they want. Herostratus (talk) 15:56, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would argue that it counts as a meme under the pre-Internet definition. Daniel Case (talk) 16:44, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

OK, but then are Best friends forever and The captain goes down with the ship and so on also memes? If not, what makes this one idiom different? If so, then we have to work to do. But we're clearing out the overall Category:Memes of individual instances of memes. This would be the only article left in that category (except articles about memes themselves as a phenomenon). Shall we make a new subcategory, and what should it be called? Idiomatic memes? Memes that are idioms? Dog-related memes (or homework-related memes), if this is to be the one exception ? Paging User:Andrewaskew also to weigh in. Herostratus (talk) 02:23, 11 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]