"There are no answers. That’s the answer. There ain’t any answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer." (Gertrude Stein)
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Silly meme
Lifted from vratporz's LiveJournal:
If you and I were alone in my room right now, what would we be doing...?
A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.
1976 R. DAWKINS Selfish Gene xi. 206 The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.
susansinclair, posting anonymously to her own blog from the library, where she will not commence getting BACK TO WORK!
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2 comments:
Playing Scrabble, of course.
I gotta admit, I don't really know what a meme is. Unless we're talking about Jennifer's cat MeMew.
From the OED...
A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.
1976 R. DAWKINS Selfish Gene xi. 206 The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.
susansinclair, posting anonymously to her own blog from the library, where she will not commence getting BACK TO WORK!
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