An “absolute unit'' is something or someone that is comically oversized. One Reddit user several years ago put it like this: "I don't know what an absolute unit is, but I know it when I see it.“ And that's absolutely true. The phrasing is hard to understand at first, but once you do get it, it can be applied to just about anything.
To teach people a bit more about the origin of it, Know Your Meme wrote that the very British term “absolute unit” emerged in the meme universe in 2017. A Twitter user @mrreptoid posted a picture of a British hotelier posing with the Queen of England. He titled the photo "In awe at the size of this lad. Absolute unit," referring to the hotelier. The tweet and its caption caught on over the following days and others started using it for pictures of various amusingly large objects.
The phrase gives out a positive and celebratory vibe—you're in “awe“ at how big some things can be. The number one rule in the subreddit r/AbsoluteUnits—be nice, no reason to be a rude unit—show how the moderators try to maintain this pleasant feeling throughout the posts. Another one says that posts should include people, not public figures and no creepshots or fat-shaming pics are allowed. As the moderators say, “We're looking for animals mostly, particularly cute animals which happen to be very large.“
And the Museum of English Rural Units found exactly that. They posted a photo on Twitter showcasing a ram and captioned it “look at this absolute unit.” The tweet is counting 103.9K likes and more than 27K retweets. Adam Koszary, the museum’s manager explained that this particular ram is the complete package, full of meat and wool.
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Other livestock is not often as large and stocky as this ram. To explain this further, Koszary wrote that “size and a solid build were considered key attributes by the folks who designed our modern farm breeds.” The farming pioneers took breeds and began to design animals to suit particular climates, landscapes, and production aims. In short, they started super-sizing them.
If you're brave enough, you can look for absolute units pretty much everywhere. The fashion world is full of creatives who cannot wait to bring new ideas to the game. And the trend that has been popular in the past few years is, you guessed it, oversized clothes. According to the Cut, men's fashion is all about proportion. Noah Johnson, a senior editor at GQ Style, said, “If the Balenciaga Triple S is the piece of the moment, it’s all about being oversized to the point of ridiculousness.”
And even though dad's sneakers and enormous jackets are very bulky, they look unmistakably fashionable. The “absolute unit” meme went as far as it did “not just because it was funny, but also because it hit a cultural nerve.“ Fashion world adopted it simply because the internet is where men feel comfortable talking about clothes.
So as you can see from the compiled list of amusingly oversized stuff, “absolute unit” can be implied to nearly everything. After seeing real examples of it, you should understand the essence of what being an absolute unit brings about.
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