Clive Thompson, “That Way We’re All Writing Now” (The Message, Medium blog, Mar. 6, 2015)
To suss this out, I called up some linguists: Gretchen McCulloch… and Ben Zimmer, a linguist with Vocabulary.com who writes for the Wall Street Journal. As they pointed out, this style of wordplay initially appeared—like most online memes — on image-boards, Tumblr and Youtube. An early version was the meme “that feel when”; variants morphed into the standalone phrase “that awkward moment when”, which by last year was common enough to appear as a movie title.
Read the rest here.