Polish Paremic Demotivators: Tradition in an Internet Genre

The author examines the use of proverbs in Polish demotivators, an Internet memetic genre. The article discusses the place of proverbs in Internet folklore and places the concepts of demotivator and proverb amongst memetic phenomena. The study focuses on paremic demotivators (satires of motivational posters that contain a proverb) extracted from Polish websites devoted to demotivational creativity and examines the structure of paremic demotivators with an eye to describing the role of paremias in the structure of demotivators. The author classifies paremic demotivators on the basis of the proverbs' form, meaning, and function.