2012/01/19 by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Discourse Analysis in Language Studies #Humor Studies and Applications #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
paper · pdf · doi:10.1162/posc_a_00057
openalex publication_date 2012/01/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
When the “meme” was introduced in 1976, it was as a metaphor intended to illuminate an evolutionary argument. By the late-1980s, however, we see from its use in major US newspapers that this original meaning had become obscured. The meme became a virus of the mind. (In the UK, this occurred slightly later.) It is also now clear that this becoming involved complex sustained interactions between scholars, journalists, and the letter-writing public. We must therefore read the “meme” through lenses provided by its popularization. The results are in turn suggestive of the processes of meaning-construction in scholarly communication more generally.