Pyramid guilting

Combines "pyramid" as in pyramid sales, and guilting, to provide a collective descriptor for all those items of social media content that seek to get themselves viral by exploiting human decency and empathy.

Individually they are generally good and moral, but as a collective phenomenon, they are experienced as moral blackmail and only cause empathy fatigue and insidious alienation from the causes they seek to promote.

That pyramid-guilt post was trying to suggest I wasn't loyal to my friends unless I liked, shared and copy-paste posted it to everyone.

Pyramid guilting is usually bad and wrong and 'poor me' attention-seeking but, just sometimes, it really is done for a sufficiently good cause.

smart arse

The British or Commonwealth English counterpart of the American English "smart ass" (probably the form in which it was invented, before being borrowed back into British English).

Calling someone a smart arse is intended to pull them down a peg or two for adopting a position of superiority, especially intellectual:
(1) through sarcasm,
(2) by using obscure knowledge to score points off other people, or
(3) just being too f**king smug when they're right about something.

"Oh, Alice, you're such a smart ass."
"Actually, Bob, I would prefer to be insulted using the correct, British English pronunciation: 'smart arse'."
"But, Alice, I think you'll find 'arse' has been pronounced 'ass' since at least Shakespeare's time, and therefore far pre-dates the division of English into British and American variants."

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