The origin of the iconic French memes (5/5): “Theme of the size of the rat”

You quietly have a drink with friends, and the crucial moment of the account arrives. There, you keep a low profile, casually… and suddenly, the assembly points a finger at you, yelling “rat size theme”! If this situation sounds familiar to you, you should know that it originated from the person of a real rodent, who became a social media star in 2022.

This expression is now used to describe someone as stingy, a “rat”, a miser.

But the origin of the meme has nothing to do with being around your pennies. It was an Anglo-Saxon Facebook user who posted a first photo of the rat in question, which looked huge due to an optical effect. “The rats are back in London,” he said, laughing.

Therefore, a French netizen did the same, retweeted the photo and indicated “rat size theme” (theme = matte = look). He quickly deflected the expression to denounce, humorously, “stingy.” The Dealabs site, known for offering discount deals, and its community regularly use it for this purpose.

A TikTok filter to replace his head with that of a large rat continued to popularize the expression in the same vein. Videos of people using it have doubled down on their tricks to show the most absurd savings.

We see, for example, in this video, the former Minister of Transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, who was riding the trend.

Finally, a more distinguished version with Stephane Bern as a star guest also had enormous success on social networks (image above). The sentence “subject to the size of the rat” is here replaced by “consider the size of this representative of the murids.”