I love how, because of that “Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure” Onion headline, “cinnamon roll” has become a commonly accepted phrase for “a character who is cute and kind and typically gets more pain in canon than they deserve”.
Like, we didn’t have a real phrase for that common phenomenon (wubbie maybe, but that has negative connotations ie “this character has been wubbiefied by the fandom”) and then someone used a screenshot of a headline from a satire news website to describe it, and then everyone else was like “yes good let’s use this”. You couldn’t make that shit up. I bet there are people who use that phrase now who didn’t even see that headline.
Language is evolving right before our eyes in a very weird and beautiful way and I am very very sorry for future linguist who have to puzzle this shit out.
Reblogging this because I didn’t know where “cinnamon roll” came from and I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks.
All language is composed of memes if you think about it. All language is viral.
