Contagion, illness, virus, meme.

One could look at these four words and immediately point out that "meme" sticks out. It reads as an outlier. But is it?

The word meme has taken on a new meaning within the last couple of decades - really since the creation of the world wide web. We now associate the word meme to mean something silly. A repeated formula that is recognisable and often used to make us laugh.

This isn't what the word is supposed to mean. The word originated as part of the theory of the evolution of culture, and was coined by Richard Dawkins. The meme is a unit of culture, like the gene is a unit of the body. The word is analogous with the word phoneme (similar sounds in speech) or morpheme (the smallest unit of a word). Think the french word, même, meaning same. There is a pattern here.

A meme is a virus, able to propagate and spread in the same way. Why else would something popular become “viral“? With internet culture becoming a larger part of everyone's life, its becoming pertinent to understand the role it is playing in shaping our culture and language. The comparison of memes to a virus is especially relevant in the aftermath of the pandemic. What relevance does the study of memes have on the way young people are experiencing culture and influencing language.

It is so fascinating that so much of our language to describe the negative effects of internet culture is linked to disease - brainrot as an example. But if we take the word to mean what its "actually" supposed to mean, there is nothing inherently harmful about it. Memes are simply units of information passed from person to person. A natural phenomenon. How do we mitigate brainrot in a culture that relies on memes to spread ideas (think the very basis of marketing and algorithms). We are so aware of them, their presence, yet fall prey to them regardless.

The semantic shift that the word itself has gone through is suggestive of the power memes have. Whether we like it or not, they are influencing us at an astounding rate. We are experiencing changes in our language and speech in real time, barely able to keep up. This is why the study and monitoring of memes is so important - generations have always had dialectical differences, but with the internet and the speed at which it is influencing language, it is so important to keep track of what is going on. Simple changes like dictating punctuation in speech - "period" (sometimes spelled with a t) to emphasis a point. "Slash" is now used to indicate what would be a slash in written text, a word synonymous with the previous slang "and/or". The shortening of "win" from quote unquote gamer lingo to "w" to indicate if something is good regardless of the context. These are all linguistic changes that are being seen and used on a regular basis.

Any attempt to catalogue all these changes into a word cloud or similar graphic would be futile. There would be new ones in the time it took to create.

Sure some of these may be more niche than others, but the use of the word "normalize" has been entirely...normalized, even in professional contexts. Our ability to code switch is decreasing. This is not a good thing nor a bad thing: just something we need to be aware of.

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/crosswords/what-is-a-meme.html

https://www.wired.com/story/richard-dawkins-memes/

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