I'm optimistic to see the day
A Ducreux post.
The pub quiz asks who painted the Mona Lisa and you answer in a voice that nobody asked for. "The fair lady of Florence, wrought by Master Leonardo!" Your team stares. You point at them anyway. Your friend asks if you remember their birthday. You do, naturally, but you reply with a grand "Verily, I remembered every day!" It is the 14th. Their birthday was the 9th. The group chat is dead. You break the silence by announcing that the nocturnal luminary rises in the quarter opposite the sun's return. Someone reacts with a thumbs up. That is the whole conversation. You rewrite "see you at eight" as a theatrical flourish nobody requested, add a pointed finger for good measure, and send it. Your mate replies "ok?" The thumbs-up of destiny has been withheld. **Why it caught on:** the picture is a portrait of a man in a wide black hat and powdered hair, smiling and pointing straight at the viewer, painted in the eighteenth century by the French artist Joseph Ducreux. Online, people paired it with ordinary phrases rewritten in absurdly ornate, archaic English, and the pointing, knowing look made any plain sentence sound like a proclamation. It spread because the format is easy to copy: take any dull line, dress it up, and the portrait does the rest.