I’m guilty, it’s my fault. I started the #donk thing on Twitter.
I had no intention of starting a wacky internet craze or meme surrounding the word ‘Donk’, I was merely thinking aloud and the internet did the rest. Honestly, it did.
By way of background, Put A Donk On It is a record by The Blackout Crew and is without a doubt one of the high watermarks of popular music in the 21st Century so far. The fact that it wasn’t a global hit remains an absolute mystery to me. Here’s how it goes:
I’ve become mildly obsessed with the record and the word “Donk” has become part of my everyday vocabulary. Why simply say “Yes” when you can say “Put A Donk On It!”? So, when the following thought occurred to me at around 4pm today, I posted it onto my Twitter profile:
(If you don’t get the image, the Tweet said “How long would it take to make “Donk” a trending topic on Twitter? #donk”)
Like I say, it was an idle thought. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I got one just the same. The answer, it turns out, is 1hr and 31 minutes. Within minutes of posting the message, my own small corner of Twitter went #donking mad. The vast majority of my personal Twitter network are, like me, from the Birmingham area and so were all online at the same time, which helped. A few of them responded to my question and quite quickly a few of them retweeted my message. Once again, I thought that would be the end of it.
Then two very interesting things happened…
Firstly @jakedubber started to insert superfluous #donks into his tweets and other people began to copy him. Then @jonhickman, @bounder and @pigsonthewing started posting song and movie titles with the word ‘Donk’ replacing certain, similar words (“Donk Go Breaking My Heart”, “Honky Donk Women” etc) and it became a game….a game that caught on super fast.
Quite quickly every other Tweet on my screen featured the word #donk in some form or another, and a search revealed that the word was indeed a trending Twitter topic, which isn’t bad going considering that Valentines Day and Follow Friday are extremely popular subjects today.
At the time of writing this (7pm UK time, 3 hours after my original tweet), the United States has began to wake up for the day and many are wondering what on earth #donk means.
I’ve no idea how long Twitter will keep on donking, but I suspect it won’t be very long, but if it does keep going hopefully this post goes some way to explain it. In a nutshell, blame the Brummies.
…and if you’d care to comment, please don’t forget to put a banging donk on it.
