John's Blog

O RLY! owl contains hundreds of examples of the meme that appears on numerous internet forums as a sarcastic reply to the expression of an obvious thought. The Wikipedia reference piece for this credits it to a user on the Something Awful Forum, before it swept the web and infested other popular sites like Fark, and YTMND.

Silly, silly me. All this time I had just assumed that PART of the joke was a reference to computer book publisher O'Reilly who produces those iconic "animal books" for programmers. But the entry doesn't seem to list that as an influence. Anybody other than me make that same mistake? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar I guess.

Tags: internet culture, humor, web