Dabbing

Dabbing or The Dab, is a style of hip hop dance that involves dropping one’s head with one arm raised and resting the face inside the elbow of the other arm, which essentially resembles the gesture of a polite attempt at muffling a loud sneeze. Originating from the hip hop scene in Atlanta, Georgia, the dance became mainstream popular after numerous professional football players adopted it as a celebratory gesture during games in August 2015. It became a huge worldwide meme and trend by 2016 and continued to be popular through 2017. By the start of 2017, dabbing was seen to be extremely cringe, people then started to take the piss out of it.

Origin
While “The Dab” trend is generally believed to have originated from Atlanta, Georgia’s hip-hop scene sometime during the first half of 2015, the question of who invented the dance move remains in dispute among several Atlanta-based hip hop artists and collectives, many of whom are affiliated with the record label Quality Control Music, including Migos, OG Maco, Skippa Da Flippa and Rich The Kid. According to Migos’ member Quavo, the dance has been gaining traction in Atlanta’s local hip-hop scene since as early as 2013, although it didn’t reach the tipping point on Internet hip hop communities until the local rappers began releasing songs and music videos that either feature the dance or lyrical references to The Dab during the summer of 2015, most notably Skippa Da Flippa’s “How Fast Can You Count It" and Migos’ “Look at My Dab” (shown below).

Etymology
The name of the dance itself its etymology has also come under dispute; In November 2015, a local FOX affiliate news station in South Carolina mistakenly reported that “The Dab” was named after Clemson University’s head football coach Dabo Swinney, which was quickly pointed out as an erroneous report by the readers, while many others jumped to the misassumption that “The Dab” is a reference to the act of “dabbing,” a homonymous slang term for an unrelated emerging trend of smoking high-concentrate hash oil. In December 2015, the latter misinterpretation was most infamously put forth by rapper Bow Wow in a Facebook video, which similarly prompted online backlash and ridicule from others looped in the online hip hop communities.

Reference
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-dab