May 12, 2021, 12:04 AM
Beancookerquote:
Originally posted by egregore:
https://www.vanityfair.com/cul...gerd-girl-true-storyErmahgerddon: The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl
Meet Maggie Goldenberger, who helplessly watched an Internet meme spawn from her awkward adolescent photo. Except, maybe the “Gersberms” girl never existed the way we thought she did?
By Darryn KingOctober 15, 2015
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Courtesy of Maggie Goldenberger.
In March 2012, 23-year-old Maggie Goldenberger was in the middle of a six-month trip to India and the Philippines with her then-girlfriend. They were travelling from India’s southern tip and heading north for Rajasthan, stopping in at Internet cafes around once a week, for 15 to 30 minutes at a time, just to check in with family and friends.
At one such Internet pit stop, in Hampi, Karnataka, Goldenberger received a message from a friend in the U.S., who wanted to draw her attention to an image she’d spotted on Facebook.
It was a picture of Goldenberger when she was much younger, around 11 years old, wearing unfortunate pigtails, an ugly vest, and a grotesque expression: eyes wide, eyebrows pitched sharply skyward, chin drawn inward, mouth agape, and retainer-clad teeth bared like a hissing harpy or cat. In her hands, she proudly displayed three books from the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine, in their original 90s editions: Monster Blood III, It Came from Beneath the Sink!, and Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes.
The picture had been captioned, in characteristically thunderous Impact font:
ERMAHGERD GERSBERMS
“I had no idea at this point how widespread it was,” said Goldenberger, speaking recently with exactly the kind of composure and articulacy not associated with “Berks,” as the girl in the meme was popularly known.
Three years after first becoming an unwitting meme star, Goldenberger, who works as a nurse in Phoenix, still occasionally experiences the surreal, stupefying jolt of being ambushed by her own face online. “My eyes just get wide and I say, out loud, ‘This is so fucking weird.’ ”
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Goldenberger’s friends delight in revealing her online identity to strangers at every opportunity. “Then there’ll be a 30-minute session of them looking at every single version of it. I have to fake-laugh as if I haven’t seen them all before,” said Goldenberger. “I just can't believe this is my 15 minutes of fame—I was hoping it would come in another form. But I guess you have to take what you can get.”
By the time Goldenberger glimpsed the meme for the first time, it had already gone viral, spawning into the multifarious mutations that outdo all but the most potent memes.
There are the ones with the original image plus new captions in “Ermahgerd” speech (“TWILERHT AINT GOT SHERT ON GERSBERMS,” “DIS WERS MAH FACE WEN AH READ DA SCURREH PERT”). Some used the same image with other objects Photoshopped into Goldenberger’s hands—everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd records (“ERMAHGERD LERNERD SKERNERD”) to instant mashed potatoes (“ERMAHGERD MERSHED PERDERDER”).
A whole subcategory of animal-reaction shots and expressions emerged: a pug reacting in amazement to a tennis ball (“ERMAHGERD TERNERSHBERL”), a cow (“ERMAHGERD MMMERRR”). Pictures of celebrities and others captured in awkward freeze-framed expressions got the Ermahgerd treatment too—practicing memesmiths pouncing. Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen has become a popular target, though no one can quite agree on the correct and proper spelling for “drergerns.”
Before long, there was a BustedTees T-shirt and a Nerdist music video, while the Ermahgerd category on Etsy continues to feature prints, stationery, MacBook and car decals, key chains, clothes, and cross-stitch patterns (“Welcerme Ter Mah Herme”) for sale. A Santa Barbara software engineer developed an Ermahgerd language translator and at least one Brooklyn-based artist has rendered the pixels in paint. Naturally, Ermahgerd girl was a popular choice for Halloween that year.
The most consistently popular genre of Ermahgerdism, however, involved 11-year-old Goldenberger being transposed into different scenes and situations. Goldenberger’s face has been inserted into Jurassic Park (“ERMAHGERD VERLERCERERPTERS”), the Starbucks logo (“ERMAHGERD KERFER”), France (“ERMAHGERD THE ERFL TER”), wildlife photography (“ERMAHGERD BERBER HERPERPERTERMERS”), and onto the Kool-Aid Man (“ERR, YERRRRR!!”), just for starters. She has graced several Photoshopped movie posters, including for The Gerdferther, The Nertberk, and Blerk Swern.
Not everyone has gotten it quite right.
The meme has had remarkable staying power, too. At the time of writing, meme database Know Your Meme has recorded 5 million views on its Ermahgerd entry and collected 340 distinct variations. It continues to cross-pollinate with other newer memes: one of the most recent variations, a version processed through the Google DeepDream filter (“ERMAHGERD THER ERCID ERS KERKERN ERN”), was entered in Know Your Meme’s gallery in July. Most significantly for the meme’s legacy, the term “ermahgerd” has long since transcended its origins and become firmly embedded in the vernacular of the Internet and beyond.
The whole phenomenon began, as so many do, on Reddit. Reddit user xWavy, a.k.a. Jeff Davis, started a thread called “Just a book owners smile [sic]” to share the image of Goldenberger, as yet uncaptioned. Davis was 16 years old at the time and living in Alberta, Canada, and says now, “I pretty much just found the picture randomly.” He had been browsing a publicly visible Facebook gallery of someone’s pictures. He doesn’t remember whose and didn’t know Goldenberger.
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Davis was amused—and also slightly disturbed, he said—at the sight of the picture. A regular user of Reddit at the time, he casually decided to offer it up to the community and share the LOLs. “I didn't really think much of it at the time.”
One of the Reddit users who spotted Davis’s thread was a 33-year-old former fraud investigator turned systems analyst in Seattle. Immediately, inspiration struck.
“The level of excitement in her face, the braces, and the outfit just screamed awkward tween years,” said Reddit user plantlife, over e-mail. (He declined to have his real name mentioned in this story.) Inspired in part by the lisping Shelly from South Park, the voice “kind of popped into my head as the icing on the awkward cake.”
Plantlife stamped his text on the image—“GERSBERMS. MAH FRAVRIT BERKS”—and shared the meme as a comment in the original thread. Though the “Ermahgerd” bit was contributed separately later on by someone else and took on a life of its own, the meme’s distinctive language and essence originated here.
“Honestly, what do you do when you go viral for creating a meme?” plantlife said. “It hasn't really changed my life or anything. It’s not like I got any social-status upgrades, monetary benefits, or job offers out of it . . . I mean obviously I am pretty damned funny. If you can find me a good paying job as a comedy writer, let me know. I've got a lot of hilarious ideas in my head.”
