Think of it like people who quote movie lines too much, like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2. When the line first came out, it was interesting. The repetition kills it for a while. It can eventually make a comeback, a nostalgic throwback, less a reference to the movie itself and more a harkening to our shared experience of it.
And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news.
There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it.
And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.
And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news.
There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it.
And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.