On Memes: A Linguistic Complaint

Yes, I'm aware of the irony. I EAT IRONY FOR BREAKFAST (it helps with my mild anemia).

I'm a linguistic descriptivist and not a prescriptivist, which means that I'm more interested in studying and describing how language is used by various groups and how it changes over time than I am in enforcing language "rules." However, there is one linguistic development that especially saddens me, and it is the narrowing of the usage of the word "meme" to almost exclusively mean "image macro." It's as if people had started using "technology" to only mean "smartphone" (please nobody point out to me that some people already do that).

According to those who coined the word and further developed the concept, a meme is, very simply put, an idea that acts like a virus, getting stuck in your head and spreading from person to person. Some ideas are more contagious than others.

Religions are memes. So are fashion trends, manners, jokes, selfies, mass shootings, genres, and linguistic innovations. An image macro is a picture with text superimposed on it. As a genre, the image macro is an extremely effective meme. It has nearly taken over Tumblr, for instance, and every six months Mormons on social media are subjected to a massive outbreak of the image macro meme, largely via the #LDSconf hashtag (hashtags are also a meme, btw).

Why does it matter that people call "image macros" simply "memes," when they are really a kind of meme? Because the concept of memes, properly understood, is so useful, and it's useful to have a word we can use to discuss it. If, when I say "meme," all you think of is a picture of a grumpy cat with the word "NO" on it in impact font, it makes it harder to have a conversation about why some ideas are stickier than others.

Alas, the idea of ideas as viruses is apparently less sticky than the idea of pictures with pithy phrases on them. I have little hope that the original meaning of "meme" can be reclaimed.