Gifs and memes are very much part of online altercations, the more bitter the disagreement, the more insouciant the gif. Typically a gif shows a good looking person, often a celebrity, behind a brief quotation from one of their performances. Sometimes they merely shrug, wink or laugh. They may be intended as a projection of the person who posts the gif. Some gifs are amusing but others are triumphalist. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, there was a gif which displayed a winning boxer, fist raised to show ascendancy, Corbyn’s head photoshopped on the body. This was deployed whenever Labour gained a point in the polls but, as far as I know, they have not made a similar gif for Keir Starmer.

Some memes perform the same work as gifs, for example, the image below, from an account who tweets disobligingly about Jews, essaying an appearance of enjoyment. The meme depicts an attractive woman, partying, while the superimposed words intend to justify the account’s negative statements about Jewish people and Israel.

Another meme shows a confident looking man with the appearance of a 1950s model advertising shaving cream and the words, ‘Imagine if you will a group so disgusting, they have to make laws making it illegal to hate them.’ I have seen this innumerable times from hardcore antisemites. I say hardcore but perhaps it is the meme itself which testifies to them being hardcore.

In antisemitic groups online, some members participate with nothing but memes, even posting the same meme every day. There are many ready-made memes available for antisemitic uses: groups of people in or close to government with the Star of David superimposed on each of them, to denote powerful Jewish influence and, from Holocaust deniers, images of Anne Frank or the entrance to Auschwitz, inscribed with a Shoah denying message.

I’m not altogether averse to using gifs on Twitter and have often posted an image of a sea lion if I believe someone is trying to waste my time with questions, the answers to which they will always reject. I have also used Claude Rains as Captain Renault saying ‘I’m shocked!’ and Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, saying ‘…they pull me back in.’

The word gif, I learn, stands for Graphics Interchange Format and was coined in the 1980s. The coinage of the word meme is attributed to Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, writing about cultural imitation, the spreading of an idea by mimesis. I was fond of the Doge memes which abounded some years ago, depicting a Shiba Inu expressing thoughts by means of limited literacy, in brightly coloured comic sans font.

Certain phrases are copied like memes and become ubiquitous in confrontational language. The screenwriter Lee Kern referred to the ubiquity of ‘Rent-free in your head,’ as a riposte to someone making a deleterious comment about a public figure. ‘Toys out of pram’ and ‘Spitting out your dummy’ have been similarly overworked.

There is no harm essentially in the shorthand communication of gifs and memes, the pictogrammar of our age, except when used to convey a thought which would appear intolerable if written down in words, or to confuse the torpid censors of social media platforms.

No doubt I will see many more before the day ends, some friendly, some not.

Just when I think I’m out…they pull me back in.