• 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.