Ben Ward, an Australian cartoonist who tweets absurdist gags from the handle @pixelatedboat, posted the above joke on June 12, 2016.

Last week, a little more than a year later, Oxford Dictionaries said in a blog post that its editors were keeping a close eye on the term, a hint that the phrase could join other modern constructions such as “drunk texts” and “squad goals,” which Oxford recognized this year. References to Milkshake Duck had shot up in the last month, Oxford said in its post, which also noted that an Urban Dictionary entry had been recently created, a sure sign that something may be catching fire on the internet.

Over the last year, the Milkshake Duck tweet came to capture an ever-more-frequent phenomenon: the way that an online joke can blossom until it obtains a semi-permanent position in the expanding and occasionally bizarre world of internet slang.

“I thought the tweet was a pretty good joke summing up a recent trend,” Mr. Ward said in an email. “I liked it more than my usual tweets. But I didn’t think, like, ‘Yes! This will be a meme!’”