The Circle Game or Neo Nazi symbol?

[Dill]

(05-09-2019, 11:07 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: So anyone who was a teenager between the 80's and now probably played a version of a game where you try to get your friends to see you making a circle with your thumb and index finger below your waist. If you do, you get to punch them. Many call it the circle game.

With the rise in social media, this game had a resurgence with people who once played it. You could see NFL players doing it. Jennifer Lawrence and her male costars were doing it in interviews. Lil Wayne did it on the cover of Rolling Stone.  It was on an episode of Malcolm in the Middle 15 years ago.

A year or so ago, 4chan set out on a campaign to make people think it meant white power (with the middle, ring, and pinky fingers being a W and the circle being the P). It was pretty successful. People ran with it in the media, and the fact that enough people were doing it made people think that it was true.

A cop got fired for doing it in a photo. At some point actual neo nazis began to use it, either as mockery or because they realized it is the perfect cover as a game.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and a fan at the Cubs game flashed the symbol behind a black reporter and got a lifetime ban from Wrigley. He was immediately branded a racist for it. A decent chunk of the population has never heard of it so they only know it now as an alleged white supremacist symbol.

Should a very small amount of people using it as code take away from the original context?

Reminds me of a story I once read. A balloonist went to Brazil to compete in a balloon race. He hired four locals to hold his balloon with ropes, while he waited for the start. As start time approached, he gave each the "OK" sign, and each local threw down his rope and walked off. leading to disqualification. In Brazil, as in many parts of the world, the OK sign means "You're an ***hole."

I never heard of this "ok" game. But that's how codes work. Signs get re-purposed for "insiders" to read. What is interesting in this case is the evolution of this re-coding process in social media.  Looks like a fake or experimental re-purposing can work.