Bolding mine.
What unit of language would not be a meme? Is “cow” a meme? If I use the word “cow” to transmit the this concept ,COW, is that a meme?
“How do you like them apples?” is a saying. Or a colloquialism. What does it transmit? If it is a meme, any unit of language is a meme.
I don’t claim to know a lot about “memes” other than the definition. I have not, for example, read Dawkins’ original exposition. So it is possible, nay likely that I am not using the word correctly. And to tell you the truth, my using the term was intended to suggest affectation (as was my using the word “whence” – right up there with the word “whom” in connoting, “lookit me usin’ fancy words! hyuk!”).
But yes, I would have thought that any language of unit is a “meme”. In fact the way I first read about the term was in a linguistic and cultural context (though I don’t remember exactly where so I can’t give a cite). Words change meaning over time; words affect how people think and act; how people think and act affect what they say. This “evolution” of language and culture can be considered to have underlying units of transmission, “memes”, analogous to how genes are the mechanism for evolution.
A word like “cow” may be so core as to not count as having any particular connotation, but a “colloquialism” like a slang phrase surely does – we repeat these phrases without thinking of what they mean, and when we stop to think about it, can’t explain why they are what they are. And it’s definitely cultural – native English speakers from England or Australia, for example, may never have heard of the phrase at all, it sounds distinctly American to me. So isn’t that exactly what a meme is? Something that’s getting culturally passed around with non-literal meanings?
BTW, I just tabbed over to begin reading the Wikipedia article on the topic “meme”, and Richard Dawkins himself is quoted in the very first line as saying (bolding mine): Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.. And hey, it also comments that “The idea of memes has proved a successful meme in its own right…” Which I also said, though intended ironically. It is to laugh.
As such I think it’s a bit pffft out there, a formalization of a vague and intuitive concept as a way to lend an air of empirical objectivity to intrinsically fuzzy matters.
Still, I’ll read the rest of the article, and if you want to begin a discussion on the validity of the concept of “meme” we can do that in another thread.
And, I should add, is a cognate of the French verb “péter”, meaning “to fart”.
Evidently “petards” were not considered very dangerous, at least at first… Either that, or they used a lot of sulphur and nitrogen in the mix.
I put out for consideration that ‘cow’ would not be a meme, but ‘Cow Tipping’ would.
No, no it doesn’t. Here in the U.S. the quotation mark only goes inside the quotes if it’s part of the original quotation. This is the same with the Brits.
The difference comes in for punctuation like commas and periods. The Brits out that outside. In the US we don’t think having them inside the quote marks changes the meaning of the words and it avoids that ugly blank space at the bottom where the quote mark pushes the comma or period to the right.
Question marks are an exception because they drastically change the meaning of the quote.
Had quotation mark on the mind… the first one should be “question mark.”
I thought memes were based on the phenomenon seen in eg. tits (birds, not mammal milk glands) opening milk bottles. This trait was learned between birds in the same population, not carried reproductively.