this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Science Memes
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As a Canadian, I share your confusion. I think that phrase was just a common descriptor of mitochondria in US textbooks, or a catchy line in a popular US biology video.
It's just strange enough to make a big impression on bored students, so I'm not surprised it's been memed so hard.
I think it was tossed around on Reddit a lot, too, back in the day, increasing its permeation through our ilk
Wikipedia says:
But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:
Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn't actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.
(If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I'm not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)