[ViralMeme] The History of the Word "Meme": Who Trolled Us First?

Joaquin Victor Tacla, Tech Times 06 May 2022, 03:05 am

Have you ever wondered how human civilization progressed from its primitive nature into becoming meme lords and meme trolls?

Well, that escalated quickly.

(Photo : imgflip.com/ Meme Generator)

The emergence of the Internet in this age has surely made us more creative and humorous than ever, giving us opportunities to take part in a community, albeit virtually.

But before linguists can let you finish, they want to remind you that memes did not start with the internet. In fact, they started centuries ago and were used as significant channels for cultural conversations.

(Photo : imgflip.com/ Meme Generator)

History of the word "Meme"

According to XwordInfo, the word "meme" has been used 60 times in their Crossword game since the 1940's. The New York Times attributed the coinage of meme to the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, particularly in his book, "The Selfish Gene."

Dawkin said that the term was analogous to "phoneme", which is the smallest unit of sound found in speech, or a "morpheme," the smallest meaningful subunit of a word. Unfortunately for meme lords out there, the word does not trace its roots in trolling but instead it was drawn from sounds!

In a statement with The New York Times, Linguistics Professor Kirby Conrod from Swarthmore College explained that meme is a "self-replicating chunk of information'' - by asking someone about an inside joke that they had with friends or an advertising jingle that's been stuck in their head for 20 years.

He further explained that this chunk of information tends to self-replicate because of human's nature of sharing and repeating stuff. When that information is repeated, it becomes a meme itself because it is shared, reproduced, and popularized.

In fact, according to the New York Times Crossword last year, meme means "something that gets passed around a lot."

(Photo : imgflip.com/ Meme Generator)

The word "même" in French translates to "same", while the Greek word "mimoúmai" means "to imitate." Dawkins underscored in his book that there is a need for a term that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission" or a "unit of imitation."

Hence, Dawkins used a word that sounded like "gene" because meme is ultimately attributed to memory and the French word même.

Officially, the Webster's New World College Dictionary describes 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."

This ultimately clarifies why linguists claim that memes have existed a long time ago because at its core it is a cultural information, an inside joke, and anything that naturally triggers the memory to remember or repeat it.

We produce memes because of the remarkability of the information we acquire and how it can be easily applied to the most mundane facets of our daily lives. May it be Bernie Sander's "I am asking you once again", the badass stare from Disaster Girl, the classic Exit12 template, and the popular, albeit overused Distracted Boyfriend - memes are reproduced and repeated from our memories.