The record scratch comes from hip hop DJ technique, where moving vinyl by hand created the signature scrape, and it was adopted by film and TV editing in the 1990s as shorthand for a story halting abruptly. Online, Scratch is also a coding platform popular with younger creators, which is why many searches mix the platform name with meme soundboards. That double meaning helped the clip spread across meme boards and short edits, where the roughly one and a half second length makes it easy to drop in without trimming.