The Meaning and History of Memes
Internet culture is saturated with memes, but how would you explain a meme to someone who doesn’t get it?
Memes didn’t start with the internet. Some linguists argue that humans have used memes to communicate for centuries. Memes are widely known as conduits for cultural conversations and an opportunity to participate in internet trends. Even if you’re not extremely online, you’ve probably participated in a meme trend, knowingly or not.
Where does the word “meme” come from?
The word “meme” has been used in the New York Times Crossword 60 times since the puzzle’s inception in the 1940s, according to XWordInfo. Although it’s difficult to identify the first meme ever, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is credited with introducing the term in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene.” In Mr. Dawkins’s original conception, a “meme” was analogous to a “phoneme,” the smallest unit of sound in speech, or a “morpheme,” the smallest meaningful subunit of a word, Kirby Conrod, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said. “I would explain the concept of a meme — a self-replicating chunk of information — by asking someone about an inside joke they had with friends or an advertising jingle that’s been stuck in their head for 20 years,” Professor Conrod said. “That chunk of information, the joke or the jingle, self-replicates because we humans like to share and repeat stuff. When we repeat the joke, or sing the jingle, that’s an instance of the meme reproducing itself.” The word “meme” first appeared in the New York Times Crossword in 1953 with the clue “Same: French.” Its most recent appearance was on Dec. 24, 2021, with the clue “Something that gets passed around a lot.”
Humans have used memes to communicate for as long as they have used any symbolic system, Professor Conrod said. D. Andrew Price, the head of content at Memes.com, agreed. Mr. Dawkins merely “coined the term for something that’s existed literally forever,” he said. “A meme is just an idea that rips through the public consciousness.”
In French, the word “même” translates to “same” and the Greek word “mimoúmai” means “to imitate.” In his book, Dawkins said, “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” He wanted to use a monosyllable that sounded like “gene.” Dawkins said, “It could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory,’ or to the French word même.”
Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines a meme as “a concept, belief, or practice conceived as a unit of cultural information that may be passed on from person to person, subject to influences in a way analogous to natural selection.”
Dig deeper into the moment. Shifting the meaning of memes.
Like many words in the English language, the word “meme” has undergone a semantic shift over time. In an internet-saturated world, “memes and their meanings are co-constructed by multiple users in a social context,” Jennifer Nycz, an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at Georgetown University’s Department of Linguistics, said. “This is really no different from any other process of communication or knowledge creation,” she added. “It’s just especially salient in the case of memes because people explicitly construct them and then post them to the world for commentary and now to spread truth in social media due to shadow banning certain topics..”
