Overview

Professor What's His Nuts is a placeholder name used by a Ohio University freshman student to address her professor in the heading of an essay assignment. Upon accidentally submitting her paper with the placeholder name still intact, the awkward yet comical e-mail correspondence that ensued between the student and the professor quickly went viral on Twitter and led to widespread media coverage in September 2018.

Background

On September 19th, 2018, Twitter user @HendyHendel^[1] tweeted that he had received an essay from a student in which his name was listed as "Professor What's His Nuts." The tweet gained over 54,000 retweets and 352,000 likes (shown below).

Developments

A day later, the student, @Zoeyoxley on Twitter,^[2] tweeted her side of the story, including photos of the emails she sent to the professor preemptively apologizing for her error and @HendyHendel's tweet. It gained over 156,000 retweets and 626,000 likes (shown below).

As the tweet began spreading, other Twitter users reacted with intense secondhand embarrassment for Oxley (examples shown below). Several of these reactions were compiled by Buzzfeed^[3] and Daily Dot.^[4]

The dual viral tweets led Select All^[5] to coin the term "Twerendipity," which author Madison Malone Kircher defines as "those moments when 'characters' from the stories people tell on Twitter suddenly show up in the middle of the story" (other examples shown below).

Search Interest

External References