A shot fired into the darkness

 I've used it before, but amid my gongorisms and hierobatics it probably went unnoticed. So I'm making it official, explicit, blatant and open.

I hate the word 'meme'. Hate it. It's a stupid idea, drawn from two stupid sources. The first is a bunch of French philosophes tardifs taking the genuine accomplishments of Ferdinand de Saussure (who went a long way to creating modern linguistics) and turned it into a bunch of vaporous half-philosophy. After establishing the usefulness of the concept of the phoneme, Saussre speculated that, one day, after a lot of work, similar systematic discoveries might be mad in the far hairier fields of meaning. He envisioned a name, by analogy with phonetics: semiotics. Then a bunch of highfalutin' and mainly French thinkers just sort of decided that they'd just basically accomplished all that by being them. Screw the laborious, meticulous and methodical work involved in setting up phonetics--Bam! They were semioticians because they said they were!

So, by handwaving, brandishing of academic credentials, and arrogance, semiotics became little more than a fancy term for talking about meaning. Not very much different from semantics but more scientific-like, it's supposed to do little more than impress. And it inherits the idea of the phoneme and its relative the morpheme, and does very little with it.

The second stupid direction is from Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene gedankenexperiment. As a way of looking at population genetics, it's interesting. It is no more an insight into the true nature of the human condition than saying that a human being is dirt's way of making more dirt. Teleology, as any scientist should  tell you, has no place in science except as an after-dinner guest.

So we have the ill-defined and sloppily utilized idea of a 'unit of meaning' combined with the fanciful teleology of Dawkins combining into the 'meme', a unit that propagates itself across the human noösphere and, specifically, the Internet.

What it has become applied to is an element of human conversation that is less than a fully formed idea but more than just a phrase. It's a gap in our vocabulary, and 'meme' has fallen into it. It's a powerful process, and possibly unstoppable, but it riles me to no end to find such a noisome term settling into the language. I react to it the way Woody Allen in Manhattan reacted to Diane Keaton saying 'van gaach'.  (Not even thee right wrong pronunciation--the ach-sound is voiced, and incredibly ugly.)

So, if I haven't lost you, all, I hereby nominate my substitute for 'meme': 'trope.'

Yes, I hereby shamelessly adduce my background in medieval rhetoric. But it works. It accurately describes the kind of thing we describe with 'meme': a characterization, an image, a full-bodied simile. It's short, punchy, and Greek; it sounds eddicated; and it has a far more honorable provenance.

If I win this, it'll have to be viral. I don't have the resources of Wired magazine et. al., but it has the virtue of being pretentious. Could happen.

So: trope. Try it. tell your friends.