• lugal@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I think that OP’s sentiment is more against gatekeeping what a meme is. Like if this is a meme, than political cartoons are too

        • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Well, defining words narrowly is pretty much the definition of gatekeeping. I hope you’re not gatekeeping what gatekeeping means?

          • dabster291@lemmy.zip
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            1 year ago

            You aren’t a real gatekeeper if you haven’t gatekept gatekeeping before

            • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              But who decides what the proper definition is? Your proper definition is for me a narrow if it doesn’t take into account the common usage. The definition of meme is widening. Cope with it.

              • kleenbhole@lemy.lol
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                1 year ago

                I’m perfectly happy to give orthographic dominion to Webster. They can be our Academie Francaise. They can control the definition drift. And the pedants can use their educational privilege to suppress the poors. As it should be.

                • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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                  1 year ago

                  As it has always been. As God himself intended it as we see in the story of the tower of babel

            • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              Correct

              So basically what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of people gatekeeping what a meme is without understanding what a meme is

              Or if they’re referring to the first of the definitions in the screenshot I shared, not understanding that different people can find things humorous

              The biggest meme of all is our spoken languages

          • kleenbhole@lemy.lol
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            1 year ago

            I didn’t say they weren’t. I just reject the notion that proper definitions aren’t gatekeeping. I’m not joining the above argument. I understand the definition is based on usage and the usage has changed. Most humans are morons and don’t know how to use words properly so they let language change over time.

  • I_Clean_Here@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    People no longer understand what meme means. Memes are old as time. Stories, jokes, funny images. Pretty much every form of information can be a meme.

    So, yes, this is a slightly older meme.

    • M137@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Eh, what “meme” actually means and what it currently means in popular culture are two different things. People never understood what it really means, but the most commonly used meaning of it is constantly changing.

      The word itself was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. But it wasn’t a commonly used term until around 2005, even then it was used exclusively for specific things and few people knew its actual meaning. But memes in their literal sense have almost always been a thing, and they’re common among many species.

        • cholesterol@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In Dawkins’ sense of the word, memes are ‘units of cultural inheritance’. So melodic movements in bird song, that birds teach each other, could be considered memes. Any other place you might find cultural inheritance, you could describe it in terms of memes. Memes were simply meant to be a cultural analogy to genes.

      • I_Clean_Here@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Your post is an “uh, actually” version of what I said. You are not disagreeing with me but still somehow making it sound like you do.

        I meant the term meme never applied to only sharing “image macros” but to inside jokes, coming shared references, common cultural knowledge. It is an absolutely fascinating term and concept if used like that, and I wish more people would understand it and use it in the same way.

    • Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      The chad vs. virgin meme was originally the reverse. Virgin did things the way you would expect them to be done, and Chad did things in a reckless or incorrect way.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        There’s a much longer use case now for “chad good” and that must make the originally intended users seethe. gigachad

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      The sheer gall required to condemn “yellow press” while pulling this naked manipulative baloney. “Oh yeah well your customers are like this, ‘Durrr! Duhhh!’ That’s what you sound like! Yes-huh!”

      The smarm was less thick when Colbert opened a show with “Hey America, have you lost weight?”

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Yes. Or rather, it was flashlight photography, as opposed to “old fashioned” photography where you had to hold perfectly still for several seconds. Of course, flash powder existed before, but it was messy, dangerous, flammable and left a layer of white ash everywhere. Most people today would only recognise the pan full of magnesium flash powder from cartoons, but you can probably guess it wasn’t popular at parties or with hobbyists.

      In the 1920s, flash bulbs were the awesome new thing, meaning you could take split second photos, and those could be action shots, and not staged and posed portraits. Taking a flashlight was doable quickly and easily, and of course as we all know, most random photos by random people aren’t great.

      The name photograph was already used for the old thing, so “flashlight” became the obvious abbreviation.

  • kleenbhole@lemy.lol
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    1 year ago

    Meme has come to mean cartoon. Your usage is no different.

    Meme doesn’t NOT originally mean cartoon, it just means a viral idea.

  • clearleaf@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Meme actually means something and isn’t just “funny image.” We no longer have a word for what a meme actually is. I didn’t care about the meaning of ironic changing because there’s still words for that but this is different.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      For anyone unaware:

      SATOR
      AREPO
      TENET
      OPERA
      ROTAS

      A grammatical but boring sentence in Latin which is like eight different kinds of palindrome. It was the “cool S” of ancient Rome.

      I got nerd-sniped by this a while back and tried finding any English equivalents, and long story short, there really aren’t any. It takes one palindromic word, two words which are also words when reversed, and some implications about matching letters between words. I just wrote a function that recognized when a fifteen-letter string matched the requirements (the latter ten letters being a reversal of the first ten) and trimmed down a dictionary.

      The results still rely on a lot of… almost-words. Like “apart paler alala relap trapa.” Some of these are loanwords and some of these are nonsense. “Darts apart radar trapa strad” is closer. “Farad acara radar araca daraf” highlights two things: ACARA is an Australian agency, because my dictionary was a spellcheck file, and the daraf is a unit proposed by one guy who was explicitly spelling farad backwards, because us STEM types are all huge dorks.

      After some editing, here’s a list of what didn’t seem like complete bullshit: Asses stime siris emits sessa. Cares amene refer enema serac. Damon animo minim omina nomad. Darts apart radar trapa strad. Dedal enema dewed amene laded. Detar enema tenet amene rated. Farad amora rotor aroma daraf. Gater amene tebet enema retag. Gnats nonet anana tenon stang. Hales amene level enema selah. Kayak amapa yaray apama kayak. Lasso amahs sagas shama ossal. Lasso artus stats sutra ossal. Laton animo tipit omina notal. Marts apart radar trapa stram. Mural ulema rever amelu larum. Namer amene mesem enema reman. Paler amene lemel enema relap. Parts apart radar trapa strap. Rater amene tenet enema retar. Redes edile divid elide seder. Sarah aroma rotor amora haras. Stats tenet anana tenet stats. Straw trapa radar apart warts. Sumac ulema mesem amelu Camus.