That Meme You’re Sharing Is Probably Bogus
Perhaps you’ve seen a meme floating around social media recently, purporting to reveal the etymology of the word tag.
“How old were you when you learned the game TAG stands for ‘Touch and Go’?” asks the most popular version of the meme. “I was today years old.”
This nugget of would-be wisdom spread like wildfire—one early iteration on Facebook has been shared more than 312,000 times. Fortunately, some had second thoughts about the “touch and go” derivation and checked reputable online sources.
On July 16, one day after the meme first took off on Facebook, noted a 25,300-percent uptick in searches for in their online dictionary, according to the company’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski. on Twitter, “We’re 190 years old and ‘tag’ doesn’t mean ‘touch and go.’” The tweet linked to, though for the meaning, the etymology was unsatisfyingly given as “origin unknown.” Other dictionaries, such as
