this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Science Memes
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How is her name hard to sing Happy Birthday to? You only have to say her name once in the song.
"Happy birthday to Tu Youyou, happy birthday to you"
But that isn't how the song is sung.
Sorry, it's "Happy birthday dear Tu Youyou". And you generally use their first name only, but there's no reason you can't use their full name.
Exactly, you just say it once.
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear [insert name].
Happy birthday to you.
High levels of Lemmy here.
The autism is off the charts
Agreed. I almost would have been upset if someone didnt explain this joke all the way to its death. Not to fear.
I think the corpse is still twitching.
We should have another round of explaining the joke just to be on the safe side!
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear Youyou.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear YouYou. Happy birthday to you.
It's quite funny if you don't think too much about it.
Depending on whether Tu or Youyou is her "first" name for the song it will be:
"Happy birthday to Tu"
Or
"Happy birthday to Youyou"
Both have repetition that is likely to trip up a lot of people.
People always get mixed up regardless, people refer to people by different names like nicknames or relationship like 'mom' so when you get to the name part its always some funny mix
"Happy birthday to Carol/Caroline/Slut/Mom!"
Yeah, that checks out.
Good ol' brigadier general Caroline Slutmom 😁🫡
Slutmom sounds like a British village with an unfortunate name like Cockthorpe.
"Did you know Cockthorpe has a church?"
I wonder what they worship there...
— Powerwolf, Coleus Sanctus (2013); a song about the Holy Scrotum
Yep, either way if you are singing Happy Birthday to her, you likely know her well enough to know her name well and sing it with no problem.
The singers could be staff at a restaurant who are not familiar with her...
In Chinese, the first character (Tu) is the family name while the following character(s) are the given name (Youyou).
p.s. the "ou" sound in Chinese is pronounced more like an "o" rather than than an "ooh", so the joke doesn't really work (not quite, but it's close enough. I'm not very good at speaking Mandarin so take this with a slight grain of salt)
Youyou is her first name, and it's "dear", not "to". So it would be "Happy birthday, dear Youyou".
Note that in Chinese, the first character is the family name while the next ones are the given name. So "Youyou" would be the given name!
Naming customs in various places are very fun to learn. Did you know that in Iceland, the last name is the father's first name appended with "son" (male), "dottir" (female), or "bur" (non-binary)?
You're right, I mistakenly thought that Western naming convention was being used. Fixed!
East Asian, China.
So her given name is "Youyou", pronounced Yoyo (flat high tone).
I think you might end up saying it about 4 times on accident.
"It would be hard to sing Happy Birthday to her if you purposely sang the song incorrectly!"
We can't acknowledge that, then we wouldn't be able to ignore her amazing discovery and make fun of her name instead!