About

Cool Girl Callie is an image macro series featuring a photograph of Omaha resident Elisabeth Percival captioned with various scenarios in which she treats others with respect in a similar vein to Cool Chick Carol image macros.

Origin

On May 27th, 2009, Flickr^[2] user Elisabeth Percival uploaded a photograph of herself drinking out of a coffee mug while wearing a blue tank top (shown below, left). Over the next eight years, the picture only gathered upwards of 6,200 views and 20 comments. According to Google cache, a Quickmeme^[4] page titled "Cool Girl Callie" was created in October of 2013, which featured the picture of Percival along with various captions including "Yeah, I'm a feminist / splits the check" and "Tells guy 'Let's just be friends' / Introduces him to his future gf" (shown below, middle, right).

Spread

The meme remained relatively unknown until September 24th, 2017, when the Omaha World Herald^[1] published an interview with Percival titled "Omaha woman was confused, then terrified to find that her face had become a meme," in which Percival describes how she felt after discovering the photograph was being used as an image macro (shown below).

"At first I was confused, and then I was terrified because everyone knows that the Internet can be a cruel place."

That evening, the article was submitted to Fark,^[5] where user doyner submitted a photograph of Percival holding a picture of the meme on her phone with the caption "Becomes a positive meme / lives up to it" (shown below). On September 25th, The Daily Mail^[3] published an article about Percival's discovery of the meme titled "Nebraska woman's horror after she discovers that a decade-old photo of herself became a meme."

Search Interest

External References