There have been some really good words about recently – new words that is. Not new meanings for old words, but actual new words born into the world. There are some words I’d be happy to see replaced however. Y’know, a bit like a spring clean. Clearing out the dictionary. For example, normal. It’s judgemental for one thing, and exclusive. If you are not ‘normal’ you are deemed to be ab-normal ergo not good enough. A carrot farmer was sighing this unhappy truth to me last autumn. He had abnormal carrots. But they’re just carrots, I said. Not straight enough, he said. Green leafy bit (that gets cut off and never seen by anyone else) deemed not green or leafy enough. By whom? Carrot Judge? Seemed a strange state of affairs. All the world’s languages (current estimate 7,000!) are chock full with tongue-twisting and diverse lexicons so you’d think that we could do without certain words. No-one would notice, surely?
Recently, a friend was laughing hysterically at an on-line photograph of a cat and the text beneath. I interrupted his chortling to ask him where the word meme came from.
“The internet,” he said.
“But what does it mean?” I asked.
“Doesn’t mean anything. It’s just funny.”
Hmmmmm…
“It must have come from somewhere,” I persisted.
He gave me a look that said how stupid are you? which I chose to ignore. So, other than to admire pictures of pretty kitties, I too took to the internet and had a little search. I was very surprised to find that the word meme is a very old word indeed, it’s roots belonging to those ancient Greeks. The online Oxford English Dictionary currently defines the word thus:
an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.
That’ll be the pre-internet definition then, courtesy of one Mr R Dawkins.
and
an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.
So, when I pointed out to my colleague that the word meme was not born in the early 2000’s it was fair to say he was so engulfed by disbelief he had to take the rest of the day off.
There’s a meme in there somewhere.