Tell Me Your Secrets, X

About

Tell Me Your Secrets, Grass is a photograph of a crouched man intensely staring at a piece of grass coupled with the caption Tell Me Your Secrets, Grass. Gaining popularity among image-sharing hubs, several parodies were made featuring people staring or with their heads resting on things, using the snowcloneTell Me Your Secrets, X formula.

Origin

The initial photograph was taken from a scene in season 4 episode 3 of famous TV drama Lost, titled “The Economist” and first broadcasted on February 14th, 2008. It depicts character Dr. Daniel Faraday (portrayed by Jeremy Davis) fervently checking a piece of grass (shown below, left) in order to set up scientific equipments for an experiment. As early as March 31st, 2009, a picture parody with the caption Tell Me Your Secrets, Grass^[1] was uploaded to Flickr by user rubbaducky42 (shown below, right). As of March 2015, the image has gained more than 14 000 views.

Spread

Becoming quite a small curiosity online, the first parody was reposted to several image-sharing blogs such as Meh.ro on December 8th 2009^[2], Meme Classics on February 4th 2010^[3], Funnyjunk on March 9th 2010^[4] and Nasty Hobbit on April 26th 2010^[5]. There are also various examples of it being used as a reaction image on forums, including Foam Universe^[6] on February 13th 2011.
Further derivatives involving different characters started appearing as early as October 7th 2011 with a Half-Life reference posted to the Garry’s Mod website Mod DB^[7] (shown below, left). On Funnyjunk, an October 2012 post of the caption with a 2-pane picture of an ostrich speaking to a zebra’s butt garnered more than 70 000 views^[8] (shown below, right). There is also evidence of the meme being used on imageboard 4chan, in the /tg/ (traditional games) board as early as May 2013^[9], in a thread about the Fate/Stay Night game.