war of words

Well not a war actually.

Yesterday during the simultaneous tagging and discussing of books that was going on around here, Educat sent me a comment (which came via my blogger comments email notification, I don't know how she pulled that one off). It said in part "I just so admired your unabashed use of the silly word meme..."

She is referring to the presence of that word in many of my posts. I do like that word. But I wonder why she thinks it's silly? Unlike the en vogue use of "impact" as a verb, which reflects deep and ingrained silliness on the part of the speaker/writer, use of the word "meme"is actually an indicator that one is committed to the proper and elegant use of language, as I believe this definition from dictionary.com will prove. Of course, any word can be misused. Unrestricted and wanton use can blow perfectly good words off their foundations like houses in New Orleans during Katrina's raging. But I don't think that's any reason to call them silly.

The word was co-opted by Kalle Lasn in his book Culture Jam and though one could argue that his argument was too vitriolic for its own good, he did give a legitimate explanation of the concept. And even though the blogosphere has fallen in love with, and perhaps weakened, the word I don't know that it's sunk to the level of silliness yet.

One of the purposes of my blog is to habitually engage in proper use of words of all stripes. In this way, I hope to postively impact the blogging community.

Posted to: words