Origin, phraseologization, and lingual variation of meme Will you sell the fish?

The article examines the history of the emergence of one of the popular Internet memes – Are you selling the fish? The phraseological dialogue that serves as the basis for this comic Internet genre contains various violations of language norms, among them are erroneous morphological forms of case, number and gender; inconsistency of grammatical and contextual lexical semantics; erroneous spelling; violation of the laws of lexical compatibility. These phenomena make the meme recognizable, leading to its phraseology in order to convey ironic meanings. On the basis of the meme Are you selling the fish? syncretic creolized texts are formed, including other popular memes, which in some cases leads to the phenomena of allusion, including auto-allusion, and paraphrase, which indicates the manifestation of the intertextual function of the analyzed meme. The gradual emergence of all idiomatic features in the meme Are you selling the fish?, including the stable meaning – ‘a message about the discrepancy between one’s own expectations and the harsh surrounding reality’, indicates the completion of the process of phraseologization in the aforementioned comic Internet text.