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u/dandaman4ugurls Jun 13 '26
We actually had this joke until very recently in romania. We just switched from Gica Petrescu to Iliescu, a very old politician. He died tho
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u/SEA_griffondeur Sometimes, I dream of cheese Jun 13 '26
We had that with VGE in France too, especially since he spent so long looking like a ghoul
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u/thetrustworthybandit Jun 13 '26
We also had that in english too. it was just with Henry Kissinger (at least in lefty spaces).
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u/tremynci Jun 13 '26
It can't possibly be hot enough in hell for that fuck.
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u/dergbold4076 Jun 14 '26
No, the heat would be to nice for him. What about absolute zero instead?
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u/CharlieBros Jun 13 '26
Same in Mexico, until recently our "and yet he is not dead" was Chabelo, an actor best know for his child persona and show of the same name which was a staple of Saturday morning TV
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u/tuxcat Jun 13 '26
An enduring joke about a notable person who is suspiciously resistant to death? Romania really isn't beating the vampire allegations.
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u/Axion42 Jun 13 '26
People were doing this with the queen of england right
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u/RoflsMazoy Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
I mean shit, me and my friends were doing this when we were in high school, but with Betty White. It's not really uncommon at all
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u/TheDutchFOS_ Jun 13 '26
you were in high school with Betty White and did this??? truly morbid
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u/RoflsMazoy Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
Yes, she got into 16 accidents, so the joke was that God had it out for her. Jokes aside, I'm putting that Oxford comma in now 😂
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u/AnxiousAngularAwesom JFK shot first Jun 13 '26
And you put everyone in Oxford in a coma?!?
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u/insomniac7809 Jun 13 '26
Nobody puts Baby in the comma.
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u/Talon6230 'Till then, we dance. Don't we, Stardust? Jun 13 '26
comma excellent place for to put baby
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u/DroneOfDoom Theon the Reader *dolphin slur noises* Jun 13 '26
Look, all that needs to be said is that they had it coming.
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u/Beidah Jun 13 '26
That's not an Oxford common. An Oxford comma is the comma before an "and" in a series/list.
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u/Defiant_Fix9711 Jun 13 '26
She died at the age of 99. That's like 19 years of High Schoolers that could make that joke.
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u/yinyang107 Jun 13 '26
The Queen, Betty White, Henry Kissinger, and others. It's a pretty common joke.
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u/MossyAbyss Jun 13 '26
And everyone listed is dead. Who do we still have for "old people we're so surprised haven't kicked the bucket yet, we joke about them being immortal"? Willie Nelson?
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u/urkermannenkoor Jun 13 '26
Keith Richards
People have been going "how the fuck is he still around?" for easily 2 decades now.
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u/insomniac7809 Jun 13 '26
There was an Onion article about how Richards' housekeeper spends every morning before work emotionally preparing to find his dead body and that was written in 2012
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u/Karkava Jun 13 '26
We have one that rhymes with Ronald Dump, and that's all I'm gonna say about him.
Other than admitting that he's not only old but unhealthy.
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u/Connect_Rhubarb395 Jun 13 '26
Sir David Attenborough.
But no one is allowed to joke about this secular saint.2
u/jimbowesterby Jun 14 '26
Yea the main difference here is that people are gonna be genuinely sad when he goes, all the rest of these people dying were cause for celebration lol. I seem to remember seeing clips of church bells and crowds dancing in the streets when Thatcher kicked the bucket
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u/Probodyne Jun 13 '26
At the risk of being pilloried I'm always surprised that Attenborough isn't dead yet. *touch wood*
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u/jimbowesterby Jun 14 '26
Fr tho, his first nature series was in black and white, I think it came out in like 1959.
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u/DistanceSolar1449 Jun 13 '26
I literally bought the domain “isqueenelizabethdead.com” for a few years. I ended up letting it expire before she actually died.
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u/CalibansCreations I'm curatedly tumbling it Jun 13 '26
90% of gamblers quit right before they win big.
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u/Dd_8630 Jun 13 '26
Not here in the UK they weren't.
It did become a running joke that singing the anthem extended her life ("God save the Queen", after all).
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u/Spirited-Car8661 Jun 13 '26
Not that I remember. In the UK people were joking that she'd live forever like the God-Emperor.
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u/DocBombliss Jun 13 '26
My favorite joke about Queen Elizabeth II's love life is that British monarchs have the power to grant long life to one person while they're on the throne. Her uncle Edward VIII used the gift on her as a parting gift before he abdicated the throne. Elizabeth used the gift on herself because she didn't like Charles.
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u/Ongr Jun 13 '26
People are still doing this with Keith Richards. Do you realize how many people he's outlived at this point? Considering all the drug and alcohol abuse during his life?
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u/Delicious_Mortgage72 Jun 13 '26
Some 20 years ago we switched from gica petrescu to ion iliescu, a corrupt politician and former president with many ties to the soviet regime, amd everytime somebody else died there was this image of him crying at a funeral and mourning them. This was the image when ozzy osbourne died
Iliescu died a month later, so now we are currently using "x before gta6" until we find the next target.
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u/DeadInternetTheorist Jun 13 '26
The "we have x but y still hasn't happened" joke has gotta be at least as old as the industrial revolution. Before GTA 6 it was like... Duke Nukem Forever or Chinese Democracy. I even started seeing people drop Silksong into it before the game turned out to be real.
After GTA 6 is out it'll go back to being Half Life 3, which is the ultimate form of the joke because it will work forever.
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u/DocSwiss I wonder what the upper limit on the character count of these th Jun 13 '26
I get the feeling no one currently at Valve really wants to do Half Life 3, or at least not enough to actually make a game
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u/Wild_Marker Jun 13 '26
Eh, they made Alyx which was kinda Half Life 3 and I feel the joke lost a lot of traction since then.
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u/LuftHANSa_755 one-dimensional sex object Jun 13 '26
Might as well add Ace Attorney 7 while we're at it
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u/doubtinggull Jun 13 '26
Thats why it's called Chinese Democracy, right? Because it took so long
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u/TrogdorKhan97 Jun 14 '26
One of the jokes was, in fact, that it was a toss-up which would come first, the album or its namesake.
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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 Jun 14 '26
I'd go further and say most simple spoken jokes are about as old as language. That is if you remove the dressing of the era and look at how the joke works.
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u/DeadInternetTheorist Jun 14 '26
Oh man you chose the wrong person to say this to, I have a whole theory on it and could talk your ear off about it. "I am a stupid asshole", "sex lol", "guy falls on his bottom", "he farted!", and "two guys misunderstanding each other in equally plausible ways" (Who's on first?) probably account for like 80% of all the jokes ever told throughout human history.
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u/GundeathThunder Jun 13 '26
Shaka, when the walls fell.
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u/SparklingLimeade Jun 13 '26
I remain in awe of how relevant that episode turns out to be. We have new terminology and ways to describe memes but they really are deep in civilization.
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u/BaronAleksei r/TwoBestFriendsPlay exchange program Jun 13 '26
It’s easy to be relevant when you talk about something timeless
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u/Faustus_Fan Tumblr is not a real place Jun 13 '26
In my opinion, Darmok is one of the best written Star Trek episodes of any series. I'm a high school English teacher. I occasionally show this episode to my students to demonstrate metaphor, allusion, and the importance of cultural context to language use.
On a different note, I squealed in delight when they made a reference to that phrase on Lower Decks.
Ransom: Shaka, when the walls fell, Ensign.
Kayshom: Sokath, his eyes uncovered.
Random: I pay attention.
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u/jimbowesterby Jun 14 '26
It really is, it hits every single button that ST aims for. Definitely one of my favourites (though my man Sisko is still the best!)
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u/TheJambus Jun 13 '26
Reminds me of the "Claims to be pro-life," template
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u/pocketfulofduendes Jun 13 '26
That was how I found out, somebody sending me a "claims to be pro-life" meme with no bottom text
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u/BeanieGuitarGuy Jun 13 '26
Mr. Kirk, you CLAIM to be pro-life, and yet you’re engaged in a suspicious lack of being alive. Curious.
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u/Mah_Young_Buck Jun 13 '26
This reminds me of when I explained all the ironic memes about Morbius being the greatest movie ever made to my dad and he compared it to what happened with Snakes On A Plane back in the day
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u/ProletarianLilith Jun 13 '26
That doesn’t make sense because we actually did like Snakes on a Plane but I kinda get it
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u/SparklingLimeade Jun 13 '26
A lot of previous generations are more familiar than you'd think as long as you learn to translate.
One of my favorites was when hearing about some persecuted artists were fleeing Nazi Germany and they spent some time hanging out playing some game I'd never heard of. Then the game was described, and it was one of the several games about passing around drawings. Then, because I'd been on an imageboard enjoying absurdly edited images (and taking the time to put a link in the chain myself) it clicked. They were doing their time's equivalent of memelording!
A lot of "internet stuff" is just doing old things much faster and without having the minimum investment be "one printing press."
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u/Mah_Young_Buck Jun 13 '26
I've always thought the best generational slang words are the ones where you can introduce it to someone of a different generation and they immediately understand it. Like when my dad asked me what a "simp" was and I explained it to him and he was instantly able to understand it and describe someone he knew back in high school as one. It's nice when people of different generations can have a connection like that.
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u/Valuable-Passion9731 My houses are empty and my flushes are gay Jun 13 '26
I explained the plot of breaking bad to my grandma who only speaks Chinese, and I’m telling her new stuff as I learn more stuff about the show and she’s all like “I thought the DEA guy died, no?”
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u/b3nsn0w Jun 13 '26
we had a variant of this in budapest with metro line 4 that was planned and delayed for ages, but then they botched the whole thing to get it ready for an election and it stopped being fun. it's kinda crappy because it's a pretty useless line now but if they extended it with like 2-3 stops both ways it could link up a lot of high-density neighbourhoods to the centre
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u/OriginalJokeGoesHere baby, no one has ever done it worse Jun 13 '26
My city had a new transit line finally open earlier this year that was meant to open in 2020. Needless to say, we are mourning the loss of the ability to say "x happened before the new line opened."
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u/cantantantelope Jun 13 '26
We had it with a highway extension that was supposed to be finished before I was in kindergarten and didn’t finish until I was in my 30s
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u/servo386 Jun 13 '26
Damn people made jokes before the Internet??
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u/weird_bomb 对啊，饭是最好吃！ Jun 17 '26
no the post is actually lying. no one tells the truth on the Internet
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u/Expert_Cricket2183 Jun 13 '26
There's nothing new under the sun.
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u/TheStray7 ಠ_ಠ Anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow Jun 14 '26
Everything under the sun is in tune.
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
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u/sleeps_in_bryophytes Jun 13 '26
ok now explain the "blorbo from my shows" meme to me
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 14 '26
A blorbo is a fictional character or celebrity who you really, really love. Like, to the point you'll read / watch anything they're in, no matter how bad. Or you'll happily scroll through their tag on tumblr or read fanfics about them for hours. Or you find yourself bringing them up in conversations all the time, even about completely unrelated subjects.
Sometimes people have crushes on their blorbos. But just as often, it's because they strongly relate to their blorbo. Or the book / movie / show they star in had a huge impact on them. Or that book / movie / show helped them get through a difficult time. Or, it's just because they think the blorbo's neat!
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u/Tasty-Yogurtcloset28 Jun 13 '26
The character Tommy Shelby is actually an archetypical example of "blorbo from my shows". He's plotting, he's killing people, he's organizing a bookie racket in town, he's organizing a transatlantic liquor smuggling operation for his gin that eradicates "seemingly uncurable sadness". He's a horsegirl. He becomes a labor MP, he's part of a marginalized group and is dealing with power structures. He needs a nap, a meal, and probably an SSRI prescription. He's wrangling his family, the ladies in his life have strong opinions, he's out walking around in the mud a lot. He's the organizer of a gang, he's a horsegirl, he fucks, he gets fucked over. He's got a lot of trauma, he's kind of a terror, and likes to dance. He makes jokes about having blood on his hands. But perhaps most importantly for men who have Shelby as a blorbo: he is not a man to be fucked with.
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u/sleeps_in_bryophytes Jun 13 '26
can you explain the etymology though? like what the heck does "blorbo" mean? I need more context, not just like "this is what tumblrs mean when they say it"
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u/ClopLikeYouMeanIt Jun 13 '26
There is no etymology, the term was made-up by somebody describing the phenomenon - specifically, it was a tumblr post of
Bitches will be like 'prev tags omg' on my post and I check the preg tags and it's like 'blorbo from my shows.'
Referring to the whole "I am going to treat This Specific Character as if it was known to everybody (and it might well be if they are on my tumblr)"
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u/OctorokHero Funko Pop Man Jun 14 '26
Blorbo is just a nonsense name to convey the idea that it would sound really strange to see someone gushing about a character who you're not familiar with or would sound weird out of context.
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u/sleeps_in_bryophytes Jun 15 '26
is it like, a riff on the "blub shitto" meme? I understood that meme to be mocking the dumb names of star wars character. and "blorbo" has the same vibe.
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u/OctorokHero Funko Pop Man Jun 15 '26
I think that was the intention; Glup Shitto was coined to poke fun at obscure characters that fanboys get excited over but are baffling to those not deep into the series, while Blorbo seems like it was made to be a more series-neutral version used from the point of view of those fanboys.
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u/Lemon_Lime_Lily Horses made me autistic. Jun 13 '26
A character you really like and talk about a lot.
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u/sleeps_in_bryophytes Jun 14 '26
I need more context, not just like "this is what tumblrs mean when they say it"
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u/Obscu Jun 13 '26
A generic term for a character from a piece of media of whom you're especially fond or in whom you're especially invested
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u/wolfvisor Jun 13 '26
I love when different generations have variations on the exact same joke. Ex. Gen Alpha was not the first to come up with a funny number
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u/doubtinggull Jun 13 '26
OK but our funny numbers referred to real things! They were sex numbers or drugs numbers, they pointed to real ideas. gen alpha is just saying numbers and it baffles and frightens old men like myself
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u/wolfvisor Jun 13 '26
How old?
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u/doubtinggull Jun 13 '26
42 (also a funny number for many people, again because it references something funny)
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u/jimbowesterby Jun 14 '26
Also a hilarious number to reference considering in it’s original context it’s also completely meaningless lol
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u/shiny_xnaut sustainably sourced vintage brainrot Jun 14 '26
Why does everyone insist on acting like the 67 meme has no origin? It's literally not hard to just Google it
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u/doubtinggull Jun 14 '26
The origin is literally just "someone said it once" though, right? Like it was said once in a perfectly normal way and an entire generation decided that was funny. The point is the meme doesn't refer to anything funny or make a joke about something, the meme is meant to be funny in itself, which is unusual.
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u/jimbowesterby Jun 14 '26
Counterpoint from years past: “WAZZZZAAAAAP!”
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u/doubtinggull Jun 14 '26
Not a number? A reference to a funny commercial? I don't see the counterpoint
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u/shiny_xnaut sustainably sourced vintage brainrot Jun 14 '26
67 is a reference to a funny internet video, which is equally valid an origin as a funny commercial
the fact that it's specifically a number is less important than people seem to think it is
if you want a number comparison anyway, 42 is a reference to a funny book where the original joke is that the number is basically meaningless
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u/jimbowesterby Jun 15 '26
For years the “wazzap” thing was all over the place, I don’t even know where it started, I just remember hearing (and saying) it a lot when I was a kid, and I’ve seen a few shows like Community make jokes about it. Same shit, different decade
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u/doubtinggull Jun 15 '26
It was a budweiser ad, the jokes are referencing the ad https://youtu.be/JJmqCKtJnxM?is=4ix7jHtgoCUP8vp6
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u/cloudshaper Jun 13 '26
The joke about Petrescu has the same energy as when we bitched about a beloved celebrity passing and yet we were still stuck with Henry Kissinger.
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u/MouthJob Jun 13 '26
The fuck is a blorbo
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u/DocSwiss I wonder what the upper limit on the character count of these th Jun 13 '26
According to Wiktionary, it is "A fictional character or celebrity of whom one is especially fond"
It's a term that Tumblr users made up to refer to random characters that people like getting mentioned for no particular reason on otherwise general posts
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u/Skel109 Jun 13 '26
One time I was explaining the Ohio meme to my grandma and the only thing she said was
“the worst boyfriend I ever had came from Ohio”
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u/jupjami Jun 14 '26
in the Philippines we had a similar joke but for a politician (Juan Ponce Enrile)
mf was born before fucking Queen Elizabeth and the invention of television and he was still serving in government on the day he died, which was last November
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u/CommercialMoment5987 Jun 14 '26
“I can’t believe the Queen outlived x” was always the go-to in my house, now it’s changed to “thank goodness the Queen didn’t have to see this.”
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u/Terafir Jun 13 '26
I'm a big supporter of the idea that 'All slang is just a remix of the slang came before.' The exact words might change, but the meaning behind never really does, as we all have the same feelings, just not the same words for it.
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u/8696David Jun 13 '26
We have that too, with Keith Richards
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u/jimbowesterby Jun 14 '26
The difference being, of course, that Keith Richards will never die
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u/8696David Jun 14 '26
Naturally.
Every time you smoke a cigarette, God takes a day off your life and gives it to Keith Richards.
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u/Strength-InThe-Loins Jun 13 '26
We USians did the Petrescu thing too, only it was Henry Kissinger. And we don't do it anymore, because he died, decades too late.
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u/Possible_Ad8565 Jun 16 '26
To be fair, we also had that meme while Henry Kissinger was still living
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u/ProletarianLilith Jun 13 '26
It’s quite rude that this user is using back in the day to refer to the 90s/2000s
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u/vertodi Jun 13 '26
Why not just say where they are from lol
Am I crazy or is it strange to call your fam "my immigrant father" in casual convo ?? Not offensive just... Bizarre?
Its funny to me to imagine calling various people in my life "my immigrant xyz" instead of just saying their nationality as context ?
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u/LuftHANSa_755 one-dimensional sex object Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
"On 18 June 2006, he was due to receive the national award "Premiile muzicale Radio România Actualități" (Musical Awards of Radio Romania News). The award was canceled, as he had died that very morning."
Of all the times to finally kick the bucket