About

Kill Yourself, also known in plural as Kill Yourselves, is phrase that is commonly used in online discussions in response to incompetent and/or pathetic remarks, statements, or images, with the purpose of telling those who it is directed at that they should just kill themselves for having said or done something so pathetic. The phrase is usually accompanied by the Correction Guy image macro.

Origin

Though the phrase itself predates internet history, One of the earliest recorded examples of the image macro was in July 16th, 2012 on a WeKnowMemes post titled "Best Swag Memes"^[4]. The post contain several swag related memes, among them is a picture of a boy proposing his "swag" to a girl which is then followed with the image macro.

Spread

On July 10th, 2005, Urban Dictionary user roccaphella19^[1] submitted an entry regarding the phrase, describing it as "Something that is said to someone because they are very stupid." On July 31st, 2012, the image macro was registered to memegenerator.net^[2] and is current ranked 82nd with over 78.000 registered images as of April, 2015. On Archive.moe, typing the keyword "kill yourself" would yield more than 726.000 4Chan posts^[3].
On an unregistered date, 9Gag user LAVIDALOCA55 uploaded an image (shown bottom left) which shows a facebook post where the poster mistook the word homo sapien for gay people. As of April, 2015, the post has gathered more than 45.000 points^[5]. On September 17th, 2012, Funnyjunk user edmondc posted an image (shown bottom right) which shows several twitter posts where the poster mistook her HIV positive results to being that she is clean from the virus. As of April, 2015, the post has gathered more than 73.000 views and 3.000 points^[6].

Notable Examples

"KYS"

While the exact origin of the initialism "KYS" is currently unknown, the first Urban Dictionary^[7] entry for "KYS" as an abbreviation for "kill yourself" was submitted by user the real doufas on March 31st, 2003. On April 29th, 2006, KYS was submitted to the online slang dictionary Slanguide,^[11] defining it as "a flippant way of dismissing someone for having said or done something really stupid, annoying or embarrassing." On June 26th, 2006, Urban Dictionary^[8] user Jack Carver submitted the top-voted entry for KYS.

On February 19th, 2010, an entry for KYS was posted on the Internet slang database InternetSlang.com.^[10] On September 28th, 2011, an anonymous GotKnowHow Forums^[9] member submitted a thread asking "what is KYS short for?", to which several other users replied "kill yourself." On November 9th, 2014, Redditor Espcape102 launched the /r/kys^[12] subreddit, describing itself as the "pro-suicide side of Reddit. Searches for "kys" began rising sharply in the United States in late 2015, with "kys meaning" as the most popular query.

Search Interest

External References