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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.

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Those Germans, they have a word for everything! (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 weeks ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to c/memes@sopuli.xyz

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The association between gender and the noun is in large part (albeit not completely) arbitrary. In this case, since Halter is a "masculine" noun, the compound Büstenhalter is "masculine" too. So it gets the "masculine" article der.

If it helps, instead of looking at German genders as "masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter", look at them as "der gender vs. die gender vs. das gender".

[–] Tja@programming.dev 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Just don't look for "butter".

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Wo ist der Bu... die B... fein, wo ist das gelbe Ding?

Jokes aside, it's common in gendered languages to have a handful of nouns with a variable gender. In this case, it was likely caused by regularisation; the word is originally feminine but it looks masculine, so eventually you got people using the masculine with it.

(I think that der Butter is specially common in Ba-Wü and Switzerland, but I'm not too sure.)

For reference, examples of the same happening in other languages:

Catalan - el mar (masculine) vs. la mar (feminine). Both mean "the sea". I think that "el mar" is due to Castilian interference, given that Castilian uses primarily the masculine while Occitan uses primarily the feminine.
Portuguese - o omelete (masculine) vs. a omelete (feminine). Both refer to omelet, frittata etc. The masculine is more common but it makes pedants scream bloody murder.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 2 points 3 weeks ago

At least in castillian "la mar" is only used in poetry and phrases like "me cago en la mar" or "la mar de bonito", otherwise is always masculine as you said.

[–] rockerface@lemm.ee 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I like calling them "noun classes"

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

That works too. Perhaps even better than calling them "genders", as if this sort of system was exclusively related to social gender. (Often a grammatical gender / noun class system has nothing to do with social gender; cue to Bantu languages.)