Milkshake Duck? Really?

"Milkshake Duck".  This, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, is "the word" of 2017.  Leaving aside the fact that this is actually two words (and surely the Macquarie Dictionary, being primarily concerned with language, can be forgiven a certain amount of mathematical illiteracy) it does raise a few questions.

The first and most important question is "What the hell is a milkshake duck?"  And apparently even by asking that question I identify myself as someone who does not use twitter and is largely ignorant of social media trends.  But the old methods are sometimes the best and by typing the words "milkshake duck" into my venerable google search engine I was able to come up with a satisfactory answer.  Well I was able to come up with an answer anyway.  To include the word satisfactory would strain the definition of the word to a point that even the Macquarie Dictionary would probably be uncomfortable with.

A milkshake duck is apparently the term (not word, Macquarie Dictionary please note) used to describe what happens when somebody becomes an instant internet/social media sensation for some reason or other and subsequently once further, possibly less creditable, information about them emerges the vicious backlash that occurs as the internet faithful devour their fallen god with the feet of clay.

A little hyperbole aside that's pretty much the definition I pulled off the net.  There was something about a cartoon of a duck drinking a milkshake being racist that apparently generated the term but I had been reading the article for thirty seconds at that point and was already losing interest.

For standard human beings here is a translation of the above definition.  A whole bunch of people briefly and unjustifiably hero worship somebody based on their apparent actions in a thirty second time frame.  Subsequently these worshippers find out something about the object of their adoration that makes them feel like fools for worshipping it in the first place.  Rather than resolve to be less stupid/gullible/generally pathetic in future they round savagely on the being they worshipped and tear them to shreds before repeating the process ad infinitum.

A briefer description would be; stupid people are publicly shown to be stupid and respond with outrageous cruelty to avoid actually improving their worthless selves.

And that ladies and gentlemen is a milkshake duck.  I suppose as a term it occupies less space on the page (or in twitter characters) than saying "people can really be stupid, vicious pricks quite a lot of the time" but it basically means the same thing.