What the heck is... Rickrolling?
Our new weekly series What The Heck Is… exists to shed light on the strange unexplained acronyms and unfamiliar buzzwords that creep into our everyday lives.
This Saturday it will be Rick Astley's birthday. The English pop star has given us so many hits, "When I Fall In Love", "Together Forever", and of course, "Never Gonna Give You Up", the 1987 track that's now synonymous with the art of Rickrolling.
Hopefully, most of you know the Rickroll well. But, if you've somehow managed to avoid the joys of Rickrolling (perhaps you've been on a years-long expedition of Georgia’s Krubera Cave or working on a nucleur submarine) we're here to help catch you up.
Rick rolling started around 2007 on online bulletin boards like 4chan and Reddit, where users would post a link that unexpectedly directed other users to a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Hence, Rickrolling.
It's supposedly an evolution of an earlier prank called duckrolling where people were unexpectedly send to a image of a duck on wheels accompanied by "The Picard Song" by DarkMateria. We prefer the Astley version.
