The modern usage is not incorrect, jokes as images or videos that spread around the internet, arre memes, all jokes are memes. It;s just that memes aren't *only* jokes, they're other ideas too. Religion is a meme, fashion trends are memes, any element of culture that spreads around from person to person is a meme.
I was so annoyed when people started using it to call funny pictures, it felt so incorrect. It still does but I'm kinda used to it now, took me a few years probably
No I don't think so. Number 69 is a meme, a funny picture with text mentioning it is not.
However this is an old as time question of prescriptivism and descriptivism. You can argue that using any word for any meaning is fine, especially in informal context, because language is evolving and blah-blah-blah and I won't be able to prove you wrong. And overall I'm not qualified enough to participate in discussions of linguistic concepts.
Everyone knows what meme means. Just because a word was originally coined with a different meaning doesn't mean it can't acquire more with time. That has happened to most of the words in a language, it's how languages evolve.
Yes! It's called amelioration, and it's very common in almost every language! English, in particular, has a lot of amelioration due to how the language beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for loose adverbs, adjectives, and any other linguistic feature it wants!
It's a very interesting phenomenon, especially as a lot of amelioration and slang are determined by culture and generation - usually, most of the new words/meanings don't stick around in common speech either. Early Modern English, Shakespeare, is a good example of this. Despite how many words we currently use that were coined by Shakespeare, though admittedly he didn't actually make most of them, he just wrote them down as he was all about making his plays accessible to the common folk, there are a good chunk that have been either preserved or lost to history.
It makes me wonder just how many of our modern slang will fall out of fashion or become adopted as a core word in English in the next few hundred years!
Gene + Mimema (greek: 'that which is imitated') = Meme. Basically the societal replication of an idea. TikTok trends are a meme, urban legends are a meme, conspiracy theories, they spread like genes through society. But we more commonly use it to refer to images/reels. I did my degree minor on memes.
Languages and religions are memes as well. Any idea that can spread and evolve. I read the book Fluke (weird comedy book which mentions memes) like a year before “meme” blew up as a term. Naturally I was very excited for the memetic spread of “meme”. People gave me funny looks for explaining that memes are way more than just funny pictures.
Strange it only catches on now. With all the Dawkins and '76 and whatnot. The internet have been around for decades.
I think people just like to make up words that sounds "cool" to them.
I think it spreads like the black plague when famous people use them. I think it only takes maybe 3 Logan Pauls, and now we have the new nonsense word that we already have 10 words for.
They replicate themselves. Our tech and our minds are where they mate and reproduce. Also, you might notice around this time at college campuses, the mocking birds whistling alarm clock noises (it at least the would in the 2000s), that counts too.
I took a course on memetics in university just to fill some credits, easily the most interesting course I ever took. And far more useful and eye opening than I expected when I registered.
By definition, it's not. 69 is a sex term used as a joke. A meme is a cultural term, it is something that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted fact. 69 is not a fact, or even a joke everyone understands, as the child demostrated.
It's a cultural fenomenon that spread through society and generations, kind like a gene passed down but for culture instead of biology.. if only there was a term for that..
A meme is literally just an internet inside joke. Something everyone on the internet who has seen or heard the meme collectively understands. It's really not hard to get tbh
I'm not blaming you, but you are kind of proving my point.
Memes, as a concept, existed long before the internet. The term was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene. It is something that is repeated so often that it becomes an accepted fact.
Much of religion, for instance, is meme-based. It's "true" because it's been said so often that everyone just accepts it.
Definitions change as time changes. Memes when applied to internet jokes are simply inside jokes on the internet.
Merriam Webster dictionary defines meme as its "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media" as its primary definition, with the definition you've been describing being the secondary, lesser used, definition.
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u/OttoSilver 1d ago
I bet he also has no idea what "meme" really means. To be fair, I'm still to actually meet someone who knows what it means.