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a greek meme

Posted on 2020/09/04 - 2020/09/05 by julesb

hipster: we are the granddaughters of the witches you didn't burn

her grandma: cell phones are satanic


being as i am a lazy caricature of a north american anarchist, i find myself interested in learning modern greek. one fun way i like to learn is by translating political banners in photos and greek memes.

this is a helpful hobby because the other sources i learn greek from don't teach me a lot of contemporary slang or acronyms. another reason i like it is that photos and PNGs have their words uhhhhh hardcoded? into the image? you know what i mean? i can't just copy the text and pop it into google translate; i have to transcribe each word letter-by-letter and think about it as i do.

doubtless there exist below the shallow waters in which i splash entire realms of greek memes about which i know nothing, supercool ones i wouldn't understand & don't even know to seek. i don't pretend to any breadth of scope. speaking from my own experience, however, the greek memes i come across, sourced from greek anticapitalist social media, differ in tone from the anarchist memes i see in american english.

the greek memes overall are more wry and urbane, far less nihilistically absurd, edgy, or weird-for-its-own-sake. they tend to be more directly observational and, when they are satirical, less savage. what sometimes promises at first glance to be pointed political humor will, once translated, turn out to be substantively just a pun or homonym.

while i would never knowingly cause offense, if i was given truth serum i might confess that a not insignificant portion of the greek memes i've translated resemble what some americans would call "dad humor."

turning now to the image at hand, the fact the gal on the left was labeled φασαια made me wonder if this formally classic generational dyadic counterpoint would be sexist (gasp!) but instead, like a lot of the greek memes i painstakingly untangle, it appears to center on a gentle irony presented for its own sake.

the word "hipster" feels dated, counter-informative and annoying but it's what φασαια most closely approximates: someone who's trendy and without substance. this greek term gets bandied about in some political circles as an epithet applied to those who claim an ideology but don't put in the work.

the primary joke here is that the grandmother seems far from witchy, rather the opposite. if one were to overthink it, however, a layer of ha-ha the imputed reader might derive from this "mimídio" could hinge on the grandmother's sentiment, while old-fashioned, being also more in line with many contemporary anticapitalists' attitudes towards cell phones. is the grandma in fact more RADICAL than the phase-chasing youngster?! oh me oh my!

despite modern greek's non-roman alphabet, once you nail down what sounds the letters & combinations of letters make, you can if burdened with sufficient english vocabulary often take a good etymological stab at a word's meaning without/before looking it up. in this case while it seemed clear διαβόλου was diabolical, i was kind of hoping i had misremembered the words for buffalo (βουβάλι) or diarrhea (διάρροια) and it would turn out to be one of those, either of which would have made the meme more thought-provoking.

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