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Comment by ghkbrew | Hacker News Reader

Discussion of memes is always a little surreal for me, because I can never be quite sure what someone else means when they say the word. Probably because I encountered Dawkins' idea of a meme as a replicating unit of thought before "Internet Memes" existed. I start off assuming that others are using the term with my internal definition (i.e. correctly) but then encounter clues that they mean the internet-spread picture formats. However, there is rarely enough context to be certain which meaning is being used.

It makes me wonder how we communicate at all when no two people ever quite speak the same language. It also makes me a grammar nazi as I become aware of how important a uniform shared language is :)

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Well that is super common in language, that the most common "sub-genre" of a word takes over the word itself, e.g. "pervert" now mostly meaning sexual pervert, chauvinist meaning male chauvinist, etc. As I understand it people on the autism spectrum are extra troubled by this. Although admittedly I'm also annoyed when people call these images memes even when they have not been virally spread.

It's a form of linguistic pollution.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution

I think you overestimate the importance of a shared language having all its lexicon uniformized and I think you are mistaken that a word must have one and only one "correct" meaning.

> It makes me wonder how we communicate at all when no two people ever quite speak the same language.

You should read about Wiio's Laws: http://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html

Excellent reference, thanks.

> It also makes me a grammar nazi

More precisely, a usage nazi :-) :-) :-)

I agree with you, though. Unless and until it catches on, it's only a potential meme, not an actual meme.

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by defaulting to assuming "meme" means the biological definition. The "correct" definition of a word is however most people use it, not whatever internal definition you yourself have in your mind, nor whatever the dictionary happens to say.

That's the descriptivist view anyway.

It's not that simple. Sometimes people use a word in one or several ways, while expecting other people to use it in one or several different ways. And it hardly ever makes sense to count all people equally: you're probably more interested in how the people you personally communicate with use or understand a word than with how millions of people in a different country might use or understand the word. And lots of people speak several varieties of a language, or have different registers for different social situations. It can all get very complex, but a thorough lexicographer will attempt to understand and describe that complexity, rather than claim they can solve it all with some kind of majority vote. The concept of "correctness" exists in the heads of many speakers and is part of the linguistic reality that should be understood and described along with everything else.

There is no single correct definition for any word. And most people use words to that effect.

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