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That's not a political cartoon.
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
Defining words properly isn't gatekeeping, it's categorization.
Well, defining words narrowly is pretty much the definition of gatekeeping. I hope you're not gatekeeping what gatekeeping means?
You aren't a real gatekeeper if you haven't gatekept gatekeeping before
Ah yes, no true gatekeeper.
Defining things properly isn't gatekeeping. You said narrow. I didn't.
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.
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.
As it has always been. As God himself intended it as we see in the story of the tower of babel
I love the origin of it.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-meme/
Not only is it a great origin, that's a fantastic article on it
Thank you so much for sharing
Literally all the things here including comments are memes.
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
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.
This one is also nice and true until today
Same with Musk's "revolutionary" Hyperloop, nothing new with the same people
truly amazing meme
thanks!
Pocket phone prediction is more spot on than the cartoonist themselves realized, Amish men got shunned because of the emergency alert test going off
Their hyper loop drawing is missing the Costco tube communication sound, a nice "thoonk!" Noise.
The thing he didn't foresee was the ability to turn the phone on silent mode.
We can put it on silent,, but that doesn't mean everybody does when they should!
The atmospheric railway! Patent US 21,652, system for turning rats into viscera.
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.
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.
What species aside from Homo Sapiens use memes?
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.
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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.
There's a much longer use case now for "chad good" and that must make the originally intended users seethe. 
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Were photos really called flashlights in 1920?
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.
TIL?
Memes are truly as old as the human race.
Hell one could argue that memes are as old as social constructs
So they could in all likelihood predate moden humans
Language is an in-joke that got wildly out of hand.
Are animal paintings in caves memes too?
Meme has come to mean cartoon. Your usage is no different.
Meme doesn't NOT originally mean cartoon, it just means a viral idea.
Richard Dawkins, is it you?
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No
C O P E
Meme from the American Civil War
oh ya I forgot about this one, total classic political cartoon meme too
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.
Going to be hard to beat fire and pointy sticks for old memes.
Always dipping on the chinless...
Define meme, does the Sator Square count?
A C A B
C A B A
A B A C
B A C A
So, uh, yes.
Yes (IMO) it does count.
It was passed down for centuries in a non-gene based way among people
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.
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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