About

"Looks At Smudged Handwriting" (often indicating that the writing is located on one's hand) is a literary device that leads to a humorous homophone or mondegreen. The device came into wide usage on Tumblr as a way of ironically demonstrating an advanced knowledge of various fandoms.

Origin

Writing inside the hand as a method of cheating on tests and during speeches is a well-known television trope. A Wikihow titled "How to Cheat on Your Test Using Body Parts" describes a variety of different methods for accomplishing this task in real life.^[1] One notable instance of reading smudged handwriting on the hand, and therefore accidentally replacing a word with a homophone, is from episode 304 of Hey Arnold, "Helga vs. Big Patty," in which Helga replaces the word "feelings" with "felines" after reading the latter off of her sweaty palm.^[2] (Scene begins at 14:20 below.)

The use of the trope as a literary device in microblogging began in 2015. According to the Meme Documentation blog, the first use of the phrase was by user walmart-dot-com, who used it in a now-deleted post in January. The post has received more than 105,000 notes as of March 2016.

Memedocumentation defined the format of the meme as such:

I love [thing/person], especially
looks at smudged writing on hand
[distorted pronunciation of something or someone
related to the aforementioned thing/person].

More recently, some posts drop the "on hand" part of the phrase.

Spread

On February 27th, he meme reappeared; user Falloutbay posted a derivation which featured an in-joke for fans of the band Fallout Boy, which gained over 37,000 notes.

On March 3rd, user 70spornomusic posted another derivation of the meme, which 13,299 notes.

Also on March 3rd, user japanmalum posted a derivation with an in-joke of the fandom of boyband 5 Seconds of Summer which gained over 1,400 notes.

On March 5th, user ruinedchildhood posted a derivation that used an in-joke of the fandom of Spongebob Squarepants; this post gained over 7,400 notes. From here, the meme went into wide usage, with several more posts on March 5th with thousands of notes.

The memedocumentation Tumblr documented the meme on March 4th, and subsequently recorded almost 80 separate instances of it in use. According to Google, there are over 24,000 instances of the phrase on Tumblr alone. The meme is also in wide use on Twitter, especially in musical fandoms.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not yet available

External References