Beech Tree News Network

I love a good meme.  I think we all do.  They’re funny.  Well, most of them.  The best ones are funny if you ask me.  The word “meme” is an abbreviated form of the Greek word “mimeme”, which means “something imitated”.  “Meme” was coined by the often controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.  In it, he states the following: “We need a name for the new replicator.  A noun that 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 mineme to meme.  If it’s any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to “memory”, or to the French word “meme”.  

The French word “meme” that he references means “same” or “alike”’’(though the meaning changes somewhat depending on how it’s used.  Dawkins was hoping the word would be used as a unit of cultural transmission, such as melody, fashion, or catch-phrase with the idea evolving as it spreads and time passes.  This evolution is primarily spurred by the fact that people refine the memes or simply don’t copy the information exactly when they transmit it to another human.  (www.todayIFoundOut.com) 

 One pretty cool thing I got introduced to last year was photo grid.  Well, that’s just one of the apps in which you can make a meme.  You can choose your own picture and the text that you want.  

What’s your favorite meme? There was one last year with a picture of a classroom and the caption 2008: Don’t smoke crack, and 2018: Don’t eat laundry detergent pods.  Sports themed, politics themed, all sorts of subjects, funny and serious, in meme form.  New mems are made every day.  As I said earlier, you can also make your own.  Memes will likely live forever, even if the fad fades.  I don’t see the fad fading anytime soon.