Apart from the most obvious explanations — that an ironic application of this expression strikes millions of people as funny and that apes, as the verb implies, are prone to imitate one another’s behavior — the truth of the matter is elusive. It is irrefutable that the percentage of “You hate to see it” in Earth’s atmosphere has increased. Google Trends data from 2004 onward shows that, after 14 years of neck-in-neck in popularity with its brother phrase, “You hate to see that,” global searches for “You hate to see it” surged skyward this April, on a trajectory with no signs of dropping. But from where? And why? How close can a person get to answering an unanswerable question?

Attempting to chart the trajectory of a trend using only Twitter is like trying to determine why Cubism became popular by studying the paintings of Georges Seurat and nothing else. However, because, of all the forms of social media clogged with years of discarded single-use observations it is the best worst option for conducting archival searches, we will focus our search efforts there.

The first ever platform usage of the phrase in its current popular form appears to be a temperature-related tweet from April 2009, three years after Twitter was founded. Over the next few years, the incidence of “You hate to see it” tweets increased, not because the phrase was becoming more popular, but because Twitter was.

For many years, the vast majority of “you hate to see it” content, like the vast majority of everything posted on Twitter, generated little to no engagement; a freak 2015 post from the account of the sports website Bleacher Report appears to have been the first tweet of the phrase (commentary on a botched hand greeting between two football players) to receive over 1,000 Twitter faves, but it failed to start a trend. It wasn’t until 2017 that the expression locked on its current all-hating, all-seeing course, and began producing tweets that regularly garnered thousands of faves.

The earliest borrowers of the original sports usage (i.e. the population that transformed the phrase from a Pollyannaish observation to a jeer) appear to have been fans and participants of esports — competitive gaming. By the summer of 2017, gamers were so steeped in the expression that commentary consisting of nothing but the statement “You hate to see it” was capable of generating hundreds of faves. By winter, it had seeped into gaming lexicon so completely that one December day, in the span of 10 minutes, two separate professional gamers lamented their inability to procure limited edition “Blue Tint” YEEZY Boost sneakers using identical phrasing. It was around that autumn that the term appeared to be gradually regaining popularity in legacy sports: in October, Houston Texans player J.J. Watt (himself a known gamer) offered a sincere “Hate to see it” assessment of a fellow N.F.L. star’s injury, to a chorus of retweets (4,860) and faves (38,608); two days later, the founder of the contentious website Barstool Sports tweeted it the first of many times (initially in ironic reference to a cheerleader’s wardrobe mishap).