#whomst meme

[drawnsnake]

Imagine if he actually said whomst in a later chapter...

[ask-deltarune-crew]

[askhizma]

Doctor Whomst??

[apathbacktoyou]

harry: albus severus, i named you after the two bravest men i ever knew

lily in the afterlife: whomst

[memedocumentation]

Explained: whomst meme

The whomst meme is a meme that plays on the English words who and whom. 

Although, traditionally, who is supposed to be used as the subject of sentences whereas whom is supposed to be used as the object of verbs and prepositions, this rule is often not strictly followed in contemporary English usage (with who being used in all cases). Instead, whom seems to have gained an air of formalism and intellectualism. 

A meme has emerged from this in which people extend the word whom in exaggerated ways (such as whomst and whomst’d).

According to a submission on Know Your Meme (archived link), there were instances of whomst being used in 2016. However, it did not spread as a meme until 2017 when an Instagram post from 21 January 2017 by user b3pis made reference to it.

Subsequently, the meme seems to have become popular on Tumblr in early February 2017.

The humorous nature of this meme seems to be in a similar vein as precursors to the yaint meme, which exaggerated contractions to absurd levels—e.g. y’all’dn’t’ve.

In addition to the linguistic absurdity, the meme also has another layer of humorous meaning as the exaggerated forms of the word ironically mock notions of superior intelligence. For example, there seem to be many crossovers with the expanding brain meme.

The meme may also take a form in which popular titles or names that have the word who are replaced with exaggerated variants—e.g. Doctor Whomst'd've for Doctor Who and Horton Hears a Whomst'd've for Horton Hears a Who.

The meme on Tumblr may also simply take a text-based format that uses exaggerated forms of who.

Click here to see examples of the whomst meme.

[larkfeather1153]

I REGERT NOTHING!

[astroswagilus]

spicy meme fresh off the grill

[memedocumentation]

I think there is an earlier origin of the whom meme. I don't know if anyone remembers this but I remember a post on twitter with two images, one said "women are more attracted to people who use whom/ or using whom makes you sound more intellectual" and the other picture was a screenshot of a chat saying something like "whom wants to date me" or something like that

An interesting quirk in English vocabulary is the two words shirt and skirt. They both come from the same etymological source–that is, from the Proto-Germanic *skurtjon. The question then is, how did they end up being two words with different pronunciations if they come from the same Germanic source? Another interesting thing to note is that there was a regular phonological sound change in Old English that made /sk/ sound like /ʃ/ (that is, a sh sound). That explains why the word shirt is pronounced the way it is today, but this raises another question of why the word skirt didn’t lose its initial /sk/ and become shirt?

The thing about the English word-stock of Germanic origin is that there are actually two main sources. One is passed down from the original Old English. Such is the case for the word shirt. It went from the Proto-Germanic *skurtjonto the Old English scyrte. The phonological change happened, and so the word was pronounced with a /ʃ/ sound. The word skirt, however, actually entered English through another source–Old Norse. So when the Old Norse word skyrtaentered English, this happened after the phonological change happened, and so the word actually retained its initial /sk/ sound.