A The cat that got the meme

FRIEND of mine took her son to the zoo the other day. She told me that when they got to the penguin enclosure, he shouted delightedly, “Look, mom! Memes!”

You can’t blame the child for being confused. “Meme” is a word tossed around like a penguin among playful polar bears. Birds in tuxedos have been brought under the meme umbrella by an electronically transmitted creature called Socially Awkward Penguin, and cats by the misanthropic Grumpy Cat. There are dozens of other characters that make their way around the world daily. The internet is a city of meme streets.

But what is this thing called meme? The word was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976.

“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,” he wrote. “‘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. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘ memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.”

Which explains how cats got involved. But what we call memes today are not strictly what Dawkins meant. We pass things on without necessarily taking on their characteristics. If penguins were memes, everyone would dress in black and white and have a funny walk. (Perhaps penguins were orange and crawled on the ground before they started receiving meme-mails.) If Grumpy Cat were a proper meme, we would be copying his downturned expression and adopting his hatred of everything. (Actually, I suppose some do. Without Grumpy Cat there might be no road rage.)

According to Dawkins, the selfish gene thrives because it cares only about its own survival, which is generally good for the survival of a species. Memes, on the other hand, are not always good for those whom they inhabit. The worst of them feed upon the brains of their hosts, encouraging slavish imitation devoid of thought or taste.

Fashion is full of memes (how else do you explain men in ties or women in stiletto heels?) and so, unfortunately, is language.

If enough people say a thing enough times, it catches on and people replicate it without stopping to think if it is good or right. In the American adaptation of the series House of Cards, Kevin Spacey’s character says “reach out” instead of “call”. He says it a lot. I have written about the reaching-out scourge before, but diagnosing a meme does not stop it from proliferating. It’s not Spacey’s fault, of course — the scriptwriter made him do it. Still, it’s annoying that this meme has reached out across the ocean and taken us by the throat.

The word “meme” has also become a meme. But when asked at a conference how he felt about the appropriation of memes by the internet, Dawkins said he didn’t mind at all. “The meaning is not that far away from the original. It’s anything that goes viral.”

The word “mime”, which comes from the same origin as Dawkins’s made-up word, was defined by Samuel Johnson as “a buffoon who practises gesticulations”. We see a lot of mimes on the road. I suspect that road rage is in itself a meme — one driver swore at another and all the rest followed. Which brings us back to Grumpy Cat.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word “grumpy” was invented in 1778 and doesn’t seem to have come from anywhere else. Unlike “stroppy”, which was on Anu Garg’s A Word A Day list this week and which is believed to be a shortening of “obstreperous”. You’d think it would be “streppy”, but that might mean a cat with a sore throat. Which would explain the grumpiness. Either way, expect Stroppy Cat to appear as a meme on your screen any day now.