These are some early (2008-2010) examples of “Not X” used to express amusement or mock horror on Twitter. Many cases are ambiguous, especially tweets which are replies to other tweets which are no longer available. I tried to include only fairly high-confidence examples. These were found using the basic Twitter web search UI with patterns like “Not [PRONOUN] [GERUND]” and “lmao not”.

These examples are an appendix to this blog post.

2008

2009

2010

Bonus: 2007?

(This is likely a subtly different - and less conventionalized - form of mock horror with the intended meaning of “X is not a big deal” / “X is being overreacted to”. i.e. sarcastic rather than ironic. The link the author is responding to is to this article about how Tom from MySpace might actually be 36 or 37 years old, rather than the age of 32 listed on his MySpace profile.)