Today I saw the following Burger King (@BurgerKing) tweet promoted into my Twitter feed.

These Chicken Strips tho. pic.twitter.com/cpAlpLjg9n — Burger King (@BurgerKing) October 19, 2014

This struck me as one of the saddest, if not the actual saddest, tweet I've ever seen. Brand meme twitter—the special stratosphere of Twitter where chain restaurants write advertisements in the specific and hyper-evolving vernacular of the internet—is trickling upwards, which shouldn't be a surprise since advertising as a practice is generally morally and creatively bankrupt. But where something like the Denny's Twitter is sad for society (a generation's slang being consumed and repackaged at lightning speed by a company that sells damp pancakes), this Burger King tweet is sad for Burger King and Burger King only.

If you're going to give the Denny's Twitter anything—and we shouldn't give them anything, including a Twitter account—it's that they're at least very dedicated in their cannibalism of Twitter memes.

are we out of the woods yet? cause i'm sick of eating twigs and berries i want a dang cheeseburger ayyy lmao 🌲🌲🌲😎🌲🌲🌲 — Denny's (@DennysDiner) October 14, 2014

This tweet includes two memes—repurposing the lyrics of Taylor Swift's "Out of the Woods," a budding meme; and "ayy lmao," a meme that is rapidly approaching half-life—plus emoji. It's borderline incomprehensible, but in its attempt to help Denny's acquire notoriety by co-opting the language of the internet, it's at least undisturbed.

"These Chicken Strips tho," though. A group of people somewhere decided that Burger King should, too, get in on meme Twitter, but as this was run up the flagpole they couldn't get past one tangled knot: Arbitrary Corporate Proper Nouns. So, the result: a billion dollar company using social media to sound like a 19-year-old, but unable to get itself to de-capitalize the phrase "chicken strips."

The future is garbage.