Have you ever thought about what memes are, anyway? That word is used so often, in “did you see that meme I sent you?” and “I love these kinds of memes”, that we don’t really think about its origin anymore. 

For example, the word ‘chair’ - what makes a chair a chair? 

Well, it turns out that word may come from the 12th-13th century, referring to a bishop’s throne, which in turn, stems from the latin ‘cathedra’, meaning ‘seat’.

So what is a meme?

The memes we talk about nowadays are from the internet - internet memes. Regular memes are defined on Wikipedia as “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.”

According to the “explain like I’m five” Reddit community, memes are units of culture - ideas, jokes, phrases, stories.

Memes have a curious trait - they’re like genes - the successful ones replicate, remain in the public consciousness and spread, while the bad ones drop away and are forgotten.

Retention and transmission therefore are very important to these “meme genes.” They need to stay in people’s consciousness, as the more a certain meme is used, the longer its lifespan becomes. 

But they also need to be transmitted to other people so they can ‘infect’ even more people, stay in the public consciousness longer, hopefully be transmitted again, and so on.

What’s really interesting is that the definition of internet memes or memes in general is a meme itself now. What I mean by this is that we’ve transformed the definition of “meme” and now use it to refer to pictures with slight variations in them or a banner of text above them.

So this idea, as mentioned previously, is engrained in the public consciousness so deeply now that it has mutated the original definition - memes are not units of culture, but rather funny pictures to us.

One of the first widespread memes was “Kilroy was here,” a little graffiti doodle with the same tagline. It rose in popularity during World War II and can still be encountered in the wild from time to time. 

If you were to think about it, are there memes that have stuck with you since your youth till now? Consider the “shut up and take my money” meme, which isn’t hugely popular nowadays, but can still be found as a common expression. Or that image of the guy with his girlfriend, leering at another girl and making his girl jealous - did you know that image has been around since 2017? That’s like, 6 years now, I hope I made you feel old.