Why so many people struggle with doge

Some memes are better read than spoken

Doge
(Image credit: (Facebook.com/VeryDoge))

The doge meme: a shiba inu with artistically scattered, multicolored comic sans that has its own bizarre sort of grammaticality. But since it arose on the internet, it managed to get popular without anyone ever coming to a consensus on how to pronounce the word doge out loud.

The best we have at the moment is this Slate poll that is entirely inconclusive: around 30 percent each for dohj and dogue (like "vogue"), plus around 10 percent each for doggie, dog-eh, and dough-geh, and 20 percent for "wow. such confused." If pronunciations of doge were parties in a parliamentary democracy, we'd be in talks to form a really big-tent coalition government right now.

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Gretchen McCulloch is a linguist and polyglot. She has a master's in linguistics from McGill University and blogs daily at All Things Linguistic.