Once in a while its not very often I encounter a new word. My English background and reading habits limit this meeting to only a few opportunities.

Recently, I did stumble on one that I first thought was simply a misspelling of memo. The word was meme.

In my prior gainful employment I read many memos and even wrote a few. As you would know, memo is just the short version of memorandum (from the Latin, It must be remembered).

Most of them even the ones I wrote werent of the must be remembered variety. I always believed that the Latin word was just in the wrong order; it should have been random memo. However, I digress.

Anyone who has held a job in a company, school district or government knows what a memo is (but Ill bet cant quote one from memory).

So when I went resource-fishing for meme I netted something entirely different.

If youre familiar with memes, hold up your hand and you can be excused from the rest of this column.

A meme is an idea, behavior or style that spreads by imitation from person to person within a culture.

This is where it gets tricky. Often the meme has the aim of carrying a particular theme or meaning. The meme is the vehicle for transmitting ideas, practices or symbols from one brain to another through writing, gesture, ritual or other imitable act with a mimicked theme.

Meme is a new word born in my 37th year.

The word had its birth in Richard Dawkins 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Dawkins cited the work of three ologists as his inspiration. They were an anthropologist, an ethologist and a geneticist. The studies led him into the conclusion that evolution depended on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission in the case of biological evolution, the gene.

Thus to Dawkins, the meme was a self-replicating unit with relevance to explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

He did coin the word meme and developed his meme theory, although the possibility that ideas were subject to similar pressures of evolution as were biological characteristics was noted during Darwins time.

Richard may have had some help in his choice of words.

Meme could be a shortening of mimeme, ancient Greek havent the modern Greeks made any contributions? for imitated thing.

Prior to its being identified as a meme we can consider the graffito, Kilroy Was Here! as qualifying. It became extremely popular in the 1940s, especially in the military. Then it existed under various names in other countries. Today its seen as one of the first widespread memes in the world.

Some observers have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.

The internet and its vehicles have eased the distribution of memes and many days one or two pop up in communications that pass by Trivially Speaking.

Even Twoey has picked up on memes. As he takes his constitutionals, he pauses to leave his version of Kilroy was here for other wandering canines.

More:
Trivially Speaking: Go back to 1976 to trace the origin of the meme - Loveland Reporter-Herald