Derp

The first recorded use of "derp" traces back to Baseketball, David Zucker's 1998 sports comedy co-written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In a scene where the pair get caught with a woman's underwear, Stone's character bolts from the room mumbling "derp"5. Roughly a year later, on April 21, 1999, the South Park episode "The Succubus" introduced Mr. Derp, a chef replacement who whacks himself with a hammer while shouting "Derp!"3. Later South Park episodes recycled the gag, including "The Biggest Douche in the Universe" in 2002 and "They Took Our Jobs" in 2004.

Urban Dictionary logged its first "derp" submission on May 21, 2003, crediting Parker and Stone for the coinage5. YTMND fans followed with South Park derp tribute pages starting in May 2004, keeping the sound clip circulating well before image boards picked it up.

On August 18, 2014, Reddit, Imgur, Twitch, Fark, and Stack Exchange launched the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership, or DERP, an alliance offering academic researchers cross-platform access to community data1. The Guardian reported that participating universities included Harvard, MIT, McGill, Stanford, and Columbia1. Imgur's head of special initiatives Tim Hwang told The Guardian the project grew from Imgur talking with other community platforms about how they worked with academic researchers1.

The Atlantic pointed out that the alliance's acronym choice was a deliberate inside joke, since derp's Oxford Dictionary definition made DERP a wink at the sites' own scruffy user culture2. The Verge added that any research supported by DERP had to be released openly, and that Stanford, Columbia, and MIT researchers were already working with its data at launch4. McGill graduate student Molly Sauter, one of the first named researchers, told The Guardian the alliance would help diversify the online populations academics studied1.