I don’t remember the first time I saw my dad cry, but I do remember the first time I saw him sob.
We were on a family road trip in the early 2000s and we were listening to the audiobook of Marley & Me. All of us — my older brothers, my mom, and me — started tearing up as the book began to close. By the time it ended, my dad was crying so hard he had to pull the car over.
The tears could have been a symptom of being on a family road trip with a lot of kids: emotions are high and the sleep is insufficient. But it could also be because there’s something wholesome, pure, and raw about loving a dog. Dogs are always going to be beloved. They are, famously, man's best friend, and the language we've used to speak about them had been fairly consistent. In Shakespeare's 1602 play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, he refers to a greyhound as "a good dog, and a fair dog." Today, the Good Dog hashtag on Instagram(opens in a new tab) has over 2.3 million posts.
Then came the internet, and the way we spoke changed. Meme speak came into our vernaculars. And the language we used to speak about dogs online today simply does not hold the same timeless adoration as the love we have for the animal itself.
More than a decade ago, people started posting about Doge, a meme of a photo of a shiba inu dog with words like "wow" and "so scare" in colorful comic sans printed on top of the photo. In 2012, there was the tumblr post with a picture of a dog that gave users three options: pet doge, snuggle doge, feed doge. This kind of language mirrored that of its predecessor, the I Can Has Cheezburger cat(opens in a new tab).
And that language evolved into what we now know as dog speak(opens in a new tab), making its debut in a 2017 NPR article that detailed the new lexicon: Calling dogs doggos and puppers; saying their feet tippy tap when they are excited; spotting a canine's tongue and exclaiming "mlem." It was part of our everyday language so much so that Merriam Webster considered adding doggo to the dictionary(opens in a new tab).
"I think it's easy to make anything fun with animals really widespread. Like everyone loves a cute meme," Amanda Brennan, a meme librarian and the senior director of trends at XX Artists, a digital marketing agency, told Mashable. "And the playfulness about language that happens with this kind of thing is just fun and accessible to anyone."
We needed that foundation of Doge to get there.
But nothing on the internet can stay good forever. What happened to the I Can Has Cheezburger cat's lol speak was that it started in this really niche space. Then, it exploded into the rest of the internet and, soon, became very cringe to the general public except the people who were in the lol speak community. Now, there are still people who think lol speak is hilarious — the majority, though, have fallen off.
"In 2012 we saw shiba confessions(opens in a new tab), which I think was the formation of the Doge speak, like, 'so scare' or 'wow,'" Brennan said. "That kind of Doge speak that led to how We Rate Dogs and the Twitter accounts of dog speak. We needed that foundation of Doge to get there."
The Era Of Doggos
Jeff Wallen has been moderating Dog Spotting on Facebook(opens in a new tab) for over a decade. With some 1.8 million members, it's one of the largest dog-devoted groups on Facebook. The rules are simple: Members spot a dog in their everyday life, not one they own or know personally, take a picture of that dog, and post it to the page. There's a No Known Dogs rule which means you can't spam the page with posts of your own dog, and a No Selfies rule to keep the posts dogs only. As with any group on the internet that erupts with popularity, there was drama. But the group, overall, has been joyful.
Every day, hundreds of pictures of dogs flood the group's page and, along with them, dog speak. If a tongue is sticking out, a commenter will likely point out the "mlemer." If a dog is on his hind legs, leaning up against an ice cream truck attempting to order something for himself, a member will undoubtedly call him a "PRECIOUS DOGGO." Big dogs are chonks. Dachshunds and sausagos. All dogs, regardless of age, are puppers. And they're all good dogs.
In 2016, the internet just very clearly needed a positive spot.
Dogspotting had a huge lurch in membership in 2014, and kept increasing for a few years, before tapering off to where it is now. But engagement is still good. According to Wallen, in the last month, there have been 87,744 posts in DogSpotting. On an average slow day, they see about 2,600 posts — and a popular day sees about 4,000 posts. Last month, there were over 8.4 million unique views.
We Rate Dogs(opens in a new tab) — perhaps the most popular Twitter account dedicated to dogs — had a similar experience, except it took off almost immediately. In the first month on Twitter in 2015, the account had 100,000 followers. In a year and a half, it reached 6 million followers. Now, it has more than 9 million. Soon, the founder Matt Nelson created a second Twitter account called Thoughts Of Dog(opens in a new tab), which currently has 3.6 million followers and offers insight into one dog's mind and his adventures with his stuffed fan Sebastian.
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At first, the content was all about humor, and Nelson wrote every tweet. But not long after he started the account, he realized that there needed to be more space for something else online: something more wholesome, in the face of a politically fraught America and a devastatingly annoying Twittersphere.
"In 2016, the internet just very clearly needed a positive spot," Nelson said. "And it was very easy for us to make the transition from humor to wholesome. And that's kind of what we did. We still made up narratives for a lot of the dogs, but the priority wasn't, 'let's make everyone laugh.' It was, 'let's make everyone smile,' which is less pressure because obviously humor is more subjective than positive things. Growth was also correlated with that change, which was conscious, but also slow."
Nelson says a lot of that lack of newer growth is more due to the limitations of certain platforms than a reflection on a lack of interest or engagement from the dog-loving community. Once you have a certain number of millions of followers, everyone has seen your tweets already. There simply aren't enough new people to follow along. He does measure some of the engagement on the platform with how many submissions he gets of dogs. At its peak, he was receiving thousands of DMs a day on Twitter. Now, he gets between 500 and 700.
The Cringe Creeping In
But, as the growth and reach spread so far, a similar thing is happening to dog talk that happened to lol cat speak before it. It's meme over-saturation.
"It starts out super niche, hits major popularity, falls out of fashion and major popularity, but for the communities who have found each other and embraced it, that's still going to be part of who they are as a community," Brennan said. "And it becomes niche again, but like an uncool version of niche."
And the creators can spot it.
Wallen said he and the other moderators try to spot trends ahead of time — "especially annoying trends" — and even ban them before they take over the page.
"Just because it gets old and it gets on people's nerves, but certain people can never get enough of it," Wallen said. "At one point we did try to ban that dog speak and stuff, but we didn't do it for very long. Because I decided it was just a losing battle."
I'm very proud to say that we haven't used doggo or pupper since early 2017.
Nelson also battled the language of it all, calling himself "painfully self-aware."
"I'm very proud to say that we haven't used doggo or pupper since early 2017... I didn't coin those terms," Nelson said. "Those were very much a part of dog meme speak. Those originated, and then we started using them, and we censored the word heck, and then we popularized it for sure."
Nelson says it isn't that he regrets it, but there's a part of him that wishes the rest of the internet was as intuitive about the internet as he is — and that they knew when to lay certain language ticks to rest.
"I'm still mutuals with a lot of Twitter comedians and the people that their entire content is like hating everything, but it's funny. I knew exactly when it became unfunny because I became the butt of the jokes," Nelson said. "So it was very quickly like, 'OK, well we can still be this wholesome voice on Twitter, but not use like baby talk.' And we never did that. We literally just did doggo, pupper, and censored heck."
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But just because Nelson stopped using the language he helped popularize doesn't mean the rest of the internet did, too. He said it split between two paths: One group of people, like himself, who stopped using those specific phrases. And another group of people who shouted doggo with their whole chest. And it didn't matter that he stopped using the language: His account is still forever connected to it.
"Because that was our most popular time on the internet, we're still the 12/10 h*ckin pupper account. And we never will be anything other than that because that's when we were the most popular," Nelson said. "It was a conscious choice to lean away from that just because my peers and myself found them less desirable. But it definitely hasn't stopped it from continuing in other parts of the internet."
We Actually…Don't Care
Despite some creators turning away from cringey dog speak, they aren't actually worried that it will make people less interested in dogs on the internet. First of all, people are embracing cringe online: just look at the resurgence of Twilight(opens in a new tab).
"We're in this time where people are embracing cringe," Brennan said. She isn't talking about those terrible videos of millennials defensively defending their right to wear skinny jeans in poorly-performed TikToks, but "people who are more online who just realized, this is dumb and silly, but it brings me joy and the world is melting down."
We're in this time where people are embracing cringe.
"The dog accounts are always going to be posting like that, and there's always going to be people responding using this language because they feel that affinity with it," Brennan said. "And they feel like 'This is where I feel heard. This is well understood.' And they found their people that way. And to them finding their people and talking to their people in the nuance that they have built is more important than sounding cool."
There are always going to be people who hate something because it is cringey or outdated. But, as Brennan says, "for the people who really find joy in that community, let them have that joy. Let them talk like a dog."
