The Myth Of Iron Man’s Solid Dick
Monday, August 11th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
This meme has been circulating for months on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and G+ and every other social media site where sharing funny pictures is possible:
It’s given added plausibility by the fact that there really are a lot of old comic books out there full of ancient slang that’s become risible due to linguistic drift. (The extended storyline about Batman’s great boner is perhaps the most notorious.)
Unfortunately, the Captain America panel is fake. It has been artfully ‘shopped. Here’s what the panel looks like where it originally appeared in Captain America #176:
There are more scans from this storyline here if you want more context or need more persuading.
The meme has circulated so widely that it has quite thoroughly polluted any searches you might desire to make with respect to whether the linguistic assertion about “solid dick” is true. But I could find no evidence that “solid dick” ever meant anything like “straight advice.” Ironically, thanks to the meme having replicated its bad information very effectively, “solid dick” now may have taken on that meaning in actual usage, even without a historical precedent. It’s unclear whether this Urban Dictionary entry (post-dating the meme’s circulation) is merely somebody extending the joke, or whether it’s a user-submitted entry by someone who has come to believe the false message in the meme. This bit of fan art, however, seems to have been created by somebody who was genuinely infected by the meme without realizing it was false.
Moral: Memes don’t care about truth. A false one can infect your wetware just as quick as a true one, or sometimes even quicker. The strongest ones can warp reality until it more closely resembles their payload. Be careful, it’s rough out there!
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