What's your Roman Empire? The viral memes, trends and new lingo to know in the new year

Ancient Roman emperor Nero probably did not realise that the empire he ruled over would one day become a catchphrase.

In the past year, the phrase “Roman Empire” has taken off on the Internet with an alternative meaning – a random event, incident or thing that fascinates or intrigues one to the point that one is frequently thinking about it.

The beginnings of this trace back to Swedish influencer Saskia Cort, who posted a question on her Instagram in August 2022, asking her followers to tell her what straight men thought about.

One user replied that her boyfriend thought about the Roman Empire. A surprising number of women replied that their partners were also often thinking about the Roman Empire.

This caused the phenomenon to go viral in Sweden.

But the term caught on internationally only in September 2023 when it became a viral TikTok trend in the United States. Women started recording videos of themselves asking their male partners: “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?”, with the men replying with surprising answers like every day or once a week.

As the trend grew more and more popular, the term “Roman Empire” evolved to mean something unexpected that frequently occupies one’s thoughts. The hashtag #RomanEmpire currently has 3.5 billion views on TikTok.

Businesses like fitness app ClassPass have jumped on the trend to promote their products. A ClassPass ad on TikTok says: “My Roman Empire is how I booked a month of workout classes for free with ClassPass and there are still people missing out on this deal.”

2. Kevin James shrug

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Sometimes, something goes viral and no one knows why or how. That is what happened to an old picture of American actor and comedian Kevin James in the past few months.

A Getty Images stock photo of the now 58-year-old star on the set of American comedy series The King Of Queens (1998 to 2007) – in character as parcel deliveryman Doug Heffernan, dressed in a flannel shirt while shrugging and smirking at the camera – took the Internet by storm in September 2023. The stock photo was published in 1998.

It may be something about the combination of the shrug and the smirk, but the image went viral and became a favourite of content creators and Internet users when paired with captions or situations about someone being cheeky, playful or disproportionately confident or smug about something trivial.

Singaporean content creator and YouTuber Yeo Tze Hern (@yeolo.sg) had his own take on the image too, pairing it with the caption: “Me when the caifan aunty calls me handsome.”

In August 2023, pop star Selena Gomez’s friend and influencer Dominic J West posted a candid photo of her on his Instagram Stories.

Soon after, pop culture and entertainment account Pop Base reposted the image on X (formerly known as Twitter), simply captioning it: “Selena Gomez in (a) new photo.”

Perhaps it was the faraway look in her eyes, the content expression on her face, the fact that she was wrapped up tightly from the neck down in a patterned throw blanket, or her sequinned Fendi Baguette bag placed neatly in front of her, but the image quickly went viral as users commented on the picture, saying it looked like something out of a movie.

One of the first viral memes of the picture was a tweet that compared Gomez’s mien to a “horror movie character sitting in the back of an ambulance after almost dying”. The post got 354,000 likes on X.

Since then, the image has taken off as netizens use it as an image to pair with humorous captions about feeling at peace or serene after going through or accomplishing something.

One example is a user who accompanied the image with the text: “Me when I’m wfh (working from home) and I send one e-mail.”

4. ‘Pick me’ girls

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The term “pick me” is not new on the Internet, but for the uninitiated, it is a slang term that refers to women and girls who modify their behaviour in various ways for the sake of male validation or male attention.

Its origins are debated. Some believe the term can be traced back to season two of long-running medical series Grey’s Anatomy (2005 to present).

Its main character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) tells her love interest in the show, Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey): “Pick me, choose me, love me.” She implores Derek to stay with her instead of his estranged wife.

But the term gained wider popularity in 2016 when #TweetLikeAPickMe began trending on Twitter and became known as mainstream slang, especially when skits impersonating “pick me” behaviour became popular on TikTok.

The hashtag #pickme has 10.1 billion views, while #pickmegirl has 3.5 billion views to date on TikTok.

Singaporean content creator and freelance copywriter Amanda Ang (@hibye.lovez) has a playlist on TikTok dedicated to the skits she has done on “pick me” girls and their behaviour. The 25-year-old has 70,000 followers on the platform and her best video on the topic has over 893,000 views.

 

She says: “‘Pick me’ behaviour isn’t something new. There are people who behave like that in real life and the term has stayed popular over the years because it is a catch-all term that describes behaviour people are very familiar with. It immediately creates relatability.

“Commenters tell me my skits ‘trigger’ them or make them rage because they recognise these annoying behaviours from their own lives.”

Coined by TikTok user Caitlin MacPhail, “beige flags” is a slang originally used to describe signs that someone is too boring to date.

Inspired by the term “red flags” – warning signs that someone might not be romantically compatible or desirable – MacPhail made a video series on TikTok in 2022 about “beige flags” she sees in dating app profiles that indicate to her someone is boring.

These could be innocuous preferences such as hating pineapple on pizza or references to mainstream sitcoms like The Office (2005 to 2013).

But over the past year, the term has evolved and taken on new meaning. Instead of meaning boring, it now refers to an odd quirk or trait about someone that is not a romantic deal-breaker, but not exactly a bonus either. To date, the hashtag #beigeflag has 1.4 billion views on TikTok.

Beige-flag behaviours include setting timers instead of alarms to wake up in the morning, not caring about the beach or having specific or niche obsessions.

Mr Soh of Lasalle College of the Arts expects terms like beige flags and other trends related to dating and personality quirks to remain popular.

He says: “Anecdotes that help people learn more about their personality type or relationships, things that help people express themselves or offer a glimpse of their uniqueness, like ‘Oh, this is my beige flag’ – these things will definitely stay.”

If you still do not know what “rizz” means, then you have fallen behind. The Gen Z slang was recently crowned Word Of The Year in 2023 by Oxford University Press, the publisher of Oxford English Dictionary.

A shortened form of the word “charisma”, the dictionary defines rizz as “style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner”.

American Twitch streamer Kai Cenat is widely believed to be the reason the term became popular online, when he started using it in his live streams in 2021. The term has inspired related slang terms like “rizzler”, which refers to someone who has rizz.

Content creator Darshen Kunaseharan (@kdarshen) believes that while “rizz” is a Gen Z slang, “rizzler” is a Gen Alpha slang. Gen Alpha is the youngest generation currently and refers to those born after 2010.

The 30-year-old, who has 300,000 followers on TikTok, says that Gen Alpha slang will likely dominate in the years to come as the oldest Alphas move into their teenage years.

“My followers are the ones educating me along the way. They tell me what’s in and what’s out, and I’ll pick it up from them. Sometimes it gets too hard and you’re questioning: ‘What happened to the English language?’ But it’s always amusing.”

Referencing “slay” and “ate” – both terms used to praise someone for a job well done – he says: “For example, Gen Z was using ‘slay’ previously, but now ‘slay’ is cringe. People are using ‘ate’ now and there are new ways of using it too. I see users on my feed comment, ‘Four plus four’, because that equals eight (ate).”

The biggest, catchiest songs now are those that blow up on TikTok. Just ask rookie K-pop girl group Fifty Fifty, whose bubblegum pop number Cupid went viral on the platform and subsequently charted on Spotify’s Global 200, YouTube’s Global Top Songs chart and even the Billboard Hot 100.

The latest TikTok-famous song is Little Life by British singer-songwriter Cordelia, released in October 2023, which has been used in close to 280,000 videos on the platform.

Its lyrics “I think I like this little life” is what is most popular on the app, with many creators using the song as background music to showcase sweet moments in their lives.

The song’s popularity with influencers has inspired backlash, however. One popular TikTok mocks “mean girls” who use the song to flaunt their lifestyle.

If you watch enough K-dramas, you probably know that “gwenchana” is a Korean phrase that loosely translates into “I’m okay” or “I’m fine”. Depending on the context, the phrase can also be used as a question along the lines of “Are you okay?”

But the reason the phrase is viral is because of Malaysian TikTok creator Imran Bard, who uploaded a video of himself saying the phrase over and over again, initially in an upbeat tone, but as he repeats it, he breaks into sobs.

The video, uploaded in September 2023, now has more than 71 million views and the phrase is now used as Internet lingo and a viral audio on TikTok.

It is often employed ironically, such as when someone keeps comforting or deluding himself even when things are not going well.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.