Misunderstood word of the day: Meme

I was reading something online a while ago, I’m not even sure what, and I came across the term “meme” in reference to one of those questionnaire thingees that we love to send each other (for example, the time travel bit I lifted from The Mother of All Blogs.) I thought, “What a cute little word, meme, and how perfectly it describes these things.” However, I was reading it as “me-me”, like here’s all you need to know about ME ME ME. I even used it in conversation at one point, and got a bit of a perplexed look from the person I was talking to, who obviously wasn’t as hip to what’s hot on the Internet as me me.

Yesterday, I was disappointed to find out that it is in fact pronounced meem, to rhyme with dream, and has a far more boring definition. Apparently, memes are “a unit of information that replicates from brains and inanimate stores of information, such as books and computers, to other brains or stores of information… In casual use, the term meme is sometimes used to mean any piece of information that is passed from one mind to another.” (from Wikipedia)

I kinda liked it better when it was all about me me me…

Categories: memes

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