In August of this year, “photobomb” made it into the Oxford Dictionary Online-a sign that the word had built up enough ambient density and referential power to be defined according to the particularities of its usage, and that the term had drawn a line around a phenomenon and made it recognizable.įive years ago, when Bourland and her friends sent the stingray photo to Ellen, it might have been a proto-photobomb, from the early days of the photobomb avant-garde, but it wouldn’t have had the resonance that it has today. Google Trend’s graph of the search volume for the term shows nary a bump before 2008, then a jump to a bumpy plateau from 2009 to 2011, and then a sudden spike over the last few weeks, thanks to the stingray. Or maybe the photo simply wasn’t as funny five years ago, and gained its fifteen-minutes-of-fame potential by riding the linguistic wave of the word “photobomb.” Like the stingray, “photobomb” has been around for a while, but has recently come into its own. How could Ellen’s photo-sorting intern have missed something so clearly hilarious? Maybe it was an oversight.
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