Willow's Weekly Word

Marie asked me last week, when I posted a meme, and I had to
stop and think. What exactly is a meme, anyway, and how did the
word originate? In the context of blogs, (the word blog is derived
from web logs, by the way) it's generally a list of questions that are
answered and then passed on to others and so on, often in the form
of a tag game. I pronounce meme so it rhymes with dream and
others pronounce it mem, like in memory.

A meme is:

• An idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve.
  
• A unit of cultural information that represents a basic
  idea that can be transferred from one individual to
  another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and
  adaptation.
  
• A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior)
  that is passed from one generation to another by
  nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the
  cultural counterpart of genes".

(from thedailymeme.com)

The term and concept of

meme is from the 1976

book by Richard Dawkins,

The Selfish Gene. Though

Dawkins defined the meme

as "a unit of cultural

transmission, or a unit of

imitation," memeticists vary

in their definitions of meme.

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The lack of a consistent, rigorous definition of what

precisely a meme is remains one of the principal

criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.

(from Wikipedia)

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And that's the best I can do, since I'm not a memeticist!

So, there you have it!

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(photo from Flickr)