water

Two characters share one keyboard: one is fire and cannot touch water, the other is water and cannot touch lava, and they have to reach two doors in a temple. A Flash game from 2009 by an Israeli developer, it was the schoolroom co-op game of the 2010s, and the record files it as the reason a generation learned to share a keyboard without hitting each other.

The hip-roll and water-pour choreography from Tyla's 'Water', which made a South African amapiano song the world's TikTok dance for a winter. Ended, appropriately, by spring.

A blue glass bottle of spring water that became a status object overnight because a man dunked his face in a bowl of it at four in the morning on camera. The bottle is now shorthand for a whole genre of performative discipline.

A tiger with a watermelon body, striped both ways, with a narration about sweetness and danger. One of the spring fruit-hybrids, and the one children found easiest to draw because it is, essentially, a striped circle.

The enormous bottle carried everywhere as a comfort object as much as a vessel — the emotional support water bottle — named around 2020 and made a status object by 2023, when it acquired a handle, a straw and a colourway. The record's entry for the litre of water you carry to meetings and do not drink.

Jars of used bath water sold for thirty dollars each in July 2019 by the influencer Belle Delphine under the label 'Gamer Girl Bath Water', which sold out, generated a week of news coverage and several fake illnesses, and became the reference point for every joke about parasocial spending since. The record's entry for the product that was the discourse.

The argument about how much water AI uses, begun by an April 2023 study estimating that twenty to fifty chatbot questions consumed about half a litre in data-centre cooling, and continued through 2025 with the companies' own figures: Sam Altman's blog put a query at a fifteenth of a teaspoon, Google's put a text prompt at a quarter of a millilitre. The internet argued over the bottle and the teaspoon.

The scene in Saltburn that everyone described without describing, and the January 2024 wave of memes, candles, and a 2001 Sophie Ellis-Bextor song back in the charts. The film that made a bath a punchline.