What Does 'What the Doing' Mean? the Absurd Internet Joke Taking over Your Feed
By Elena Rostova
Web culture has celebrated degraded syntax for more than two decades. Early digital communities used grammatical destruction to project innocence, silliness, or irony, establishing a lineage that directly informs today’s video feeds.
| Era & Movement | Defining Phrasing | Primary Platform | Linguistic Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006, 2012: Early Web Macro | "I Can Has Cheezburger", "Doge (Much Wow)" | 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr | Projecting cute animal anthropomorphism through toddler-like dialect. |
| 2013, 2019: Vine & Early Irony | "He do be vibin tho", "Who is she" | Vine, Twitter/X | Adapting African American Vernacular English (AAVE) into detached observational punchlines. |
| 2020, 2023: Absurdist Soundbites | "What da dog doin", "The design is very human" | TikTok, YouTube Shorts | Audio-driven ironic shock; mocking algorithmic automated voiceovers. |
| 2024, 2026: Hyper-Compression | "What the doing", "Bro think he", "Is he acoustic" | Instagram Reels, TikTok | Stripping all unnecessary grammar to optimize for rapid-fire reaction spam. |
The progression reveals a consistent trajectory: internet humor continuously reduces syntactic complexity to increase communicative speed. Early LOLcats altered spelling while preserving the basic subject-verb-object arrangement. Today's short-form comments strip away grammar until only a gesture remains.
Elena Rostova holds a Master's degree in Public Health Journalism. She covers groundbreaking medical research, holistic wellness trends, mental health awareness, and nutritional science.
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