Chocolate Rain

The headnote is right but it undersells how ordinary this was at the time. Nobody using Chocolate Rain in 2007 thought of it as a thing with a name; it was just how you talked, and naming it is what started the clock.

I tried to explain Chocolate Rain to my father in 2007. He asked, sincerely, what it was for. I explained. He then explained it, with my explanation attached, to his entire address book. That is how these things actually spread.

Filing to challenge the state. Chocolate Rain is listed as Dead and I have counted live, non-ironic uses this month. Either the definition of the state is wrong or the state is.

The one thing missing from the headnote: Chocolate Rain landed differently on people who had been online since the 2000s than on anyone who arrived later, and the later arrivals were the ones who spread it.

I have written a lot of these and this one is straightforward: 1 yr, peaked 2007, cause “Brand adoption”. There is no mystery. There is only the small sadness of a thing that was exactly right for a while.

My clearest memory of Chocolate Rain is not the thing itself but the reaction of the one person in the group who had not seen it. Watching someone see it for the first time was the actual content.

Filed as evidence: a school's parents' evening booking system, 23 May. Chocolate Rain, in a font that has not been updated since 2007. The term and the typography have met at last.