Glossary
The tongue of the Republic — from ancient Egyptian theology to Counterparty jargon, defined in one place.
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- Kek
- Three things at once: (1) "lol" as rendered by World of Warcraft's Orcish cipher, descended from Korean "kekeke" laughter; (2) the ancient Egyptian frog-headed god of primordial darkness in the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, "raiser up of the light"; (3) the deity of the internet cult that fused the two. See Chapters I–II.
- Kekistan
- The satirical fictional homeland of "shitposters," declared January 2017 after Sargon of Akkad's census joke; equipped with a flag, anthem, president, and imagined history; collapsed 2017–18 after its adoption by the actual far right. The subject of this book.
- Kekistani
- A citizen of Kekistan; the "ethnicity" of shitposters, performed as an oppressed-minority bit.
- Shadilay
- Title of the 1986 italo-disco single by P.E.P.E. that became Kekistan's national anthem; as an interjection, an all-purpose greeting and benediction — "amen," "hallelujah," and "hello, brother" at once. The word itself is an invented coinage with no prior meaning.
- Praise Kek
- The cult's standard benediction, appended to posts and shouted at rallies.
- Meme magic
- The half-ironic doctrine that concentrated collective posting can alter reality; canonized by the 2016 election and the HWNDU flag capture.
- GET / dubs / trips / quads
- Repeating final digits on a 4chan post number (…77, …777, …7777), treated by board custom as an event ("check'em") and by the Cult of Kek as the god's blessing. The greatest was the "Trump will win" post No. 77777777.
- The Octo-Sevens
- Post No. 77777777 on /pol/ (June 19, 2016), reading "Trump will win." The central scripture of meme magic.
- Normie
- A mainstream internet user; an outsider to imageboard culture. Citizen of Normistan.
- Normistan & Cuckistan
- Kekistan's fictional neighboring countries and oppressors, from whom the Kekistani people demanded liberation and reparations.
- The Great Meme War
- The meme campaigns of the 2016 US election, retold in Kekistani lore as a heroic national struggle with veterans, insignia, and invented battles.
- Pepe the Frog
- Matt Furie's 2005 comic character ("feels good man"), 4chan's emotional alphabet, briefly an ADL-listed hate symbol, later reclaimed by his creator, Hong Kong protesters, and crypto art. The avatar of Kek in cult theology.
- Sad Frog / Feels Bad Man
- The melancholy Pepe variant; source of the "feels bad green" said to color the Kekistan flag.
- Rare Pepe
- Originally a watermarked joke collectible ("DO NOT SAVE"); from September 2016, one of exactly 1,774 certified trading cards in 36 series minted on Counterparty/Bitcoin — the proto-NFTs. See Chapter XI.
- Rare Pepe Scientist
- An anonymous curator of the Rare Pepe Directory, certifying submissions as "original, humane, and dank."
- Dank / dankness
- Memetic power; one of the three factors of Rare Pepe valuation, alongside age and rarity. The only asset-pricing input ever defined as "quality of joke."
- PepeCash
- Series 1, Card 2 of the Rare Pepes; the billion-unit currency of the Pepesphere and the submission fee of the directory.
- Counterparty (XCP)
- The 2014 token protocol built atop Bitcoin on which Rare Pepes were minted; its founders created XCP by provably burning 2,131 BTC.
- Emblem Vault
- The bridge (from 2020) that wraps Counterparty-era cards in Ethereum tokens, carrying 2016 artifacts into the modern NFT market.
- Fake Rares / Dank Rares / Fake Commons
- The post-2021 successor directories, born when artist Rare Scrilla was banned from the Rare Pepe Telegram and minted his rejection as FREEDOMKEK — the "Proof of Ban."
- HOMERPEPE / PEPENOPOULOS
- The auction-record cards: Homer sold for ~$38.5k (2018) and ~$320k (2021); Pepenopoulos hammered at $3.65M at Sotheby's (2021), the record for any Counterparty asset.
- KekCoin
- The 2017 "cryptocurrency of Kekistan": proof-of-stake, 21M supply, and a "MemeChain" for hashing memes into the blockchain. Dead — like every token named for the Republic.
- $PEPE
- The April 2023 Ethereum memecoin (supply 420,690,000,000,000) that carried kek-culture numerology to an $11B+ market cap in December 2024. No relation to Matt Furie, as its own site is careful to say.
- Kekius Maximus
- The gladiator-Pepe persona Elon Musk adopted on X on Dec 31, 2024 (revived May 2025), each time detonating a same-named memecoin by hundreds of percent in hours.
- KEKW
- Twitch's laughing emote — the face of Spanish comedian Juan Joya Borja, "El Risitas" (d. 2021). The word kek's fully depoliticized afterlife.
- Big Man Tyrone
- Gordon Hurd, Cameroonian-born Fiverr video performer and YouTuber; President of Kekistan by acclamation from May 2017 until his ambiguous April Fools' Day resignation in 2019.
- Reichskriegsflagge
- The Nazi war flag of 1935 — the documented template of the Kekistan flag, with green for red, the KEK rubric for the swastika, and 4chan's clover for the Iron Cross. The dark joke at the center of this history; see Chapters VII and X.
- Irony poisoning
- The process by which a mask of irony, worn long enough, stops being a mask; the term entered common usage largely to describe what happened to Kekistan's citizens.
- Top kek
- Supreme laughter; from the Turkish snack cake Topkek, fused with "top lel" on 4chan in 2013.