מֵם (mem) — meme

Etymology

The word מֵם entered Hebrew from English "meme," itself a coinage by British biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller "The Selfish Gene." Dawkins needed a word for a unit of cultural transmission — the cultural analog of a gene. He drew on the Greek root mimeme (related to imitation) and shortened it to a single syllable to rhyme with "gene": meme. He noted that it could also be thought of as connected to "memory" or the French même ("same"). The concept: just as genes compete for survival by replicating through sperm and egg, cultural ideas compete by "leaping from brain to brain" through imitation.

The word spread slowly through intellectual circles for two decades. In Hebrew it appears in the biological sense in a 2006 Ha'aretz article by Anat Balint on the Sudoku craze, which explains: "researchers have defined Sudoku as a 'mem' (Meme)... the term describes cultural ideas that spread naturally from person to person."

In the late 1990s, the word acquired a distinct new meaning in internet culture. The earliest documented use in this internet sense was a 1998 CNN television report about a 1996 dancing baby video that had spread virally online, in which WIRED journalist Janelle Brown explained it had "become a net meme." This sense of מֵם — a viral image, video, or cultural snippet that spreads and mutates across the internet — entered Hebrew around 2008. It quickly became the dominant meaning for most Hebrew speakers, far eclipsing the original biological/philosophical sense. Today מֵם almost universally refers to a humorous image with a caption, typically flooding social media feeds.

Key Quotes

"אנחנו צרכים שם למשכפל החדש... Mimeme מגיעה משורש יווני מתאים... אני מקווה שחברי העוסקים בלימודים קלאסיים יסלחו לי אם אקצר את mimeme ל-meme" — ריצ׳רד דוקינס, הגן האנוכי, 1976

"חוקרים ממדעי החברה כבר מיהרו להגדיר את הסודוקו כ'מם' (Meme)... המונח מתאר רעיונות תרבותיים שמתפשטים באופן טבעי מאדם לאדם" — ענת באלינט, הארץ, 2006

Timeline

• 1866: Gregor Mendel publishes his genetics experiments
• 1909: Wilhelm Johannsen coins the word "gene"
• 1924: The word גֵּן (gene) first appears in Hebrew print
• 1976: Richard Dawkins coins "meme" in "The Selfish Gene"
• 1998: CNN report introduces "net meme" in the internet sense
• 2006: מֵם appears in Hebrew Ha'aretz in the biological/cultural sense
• ~2008: מֵם adopted in Hebrew with the internet/viral-image sense
• Present: מֵם in Hebrew refers almost exclusively to internet memes

Related Words

• גֵּן — gene; the biological word מֵם was coined to rhyme with
• וִירָלִי — viral; describes how memes spread
• מִיְמֶטִי — memetic (rare in Hebrew); adjective form