Memes, Streams, and Telephone Wheels

Apologies for the week-long delay between posts. The summer has been quite busy, and it can be hard to find time to blog sometimes. As you may notice, only one of these 14 blog posts has been done before midnight.

Apologies also for the annoying diction. To make up for the boring personal nature of the last post, a promise was made to cut the first-person tense entirely from this one. And, since honesty is key to any good relationship, that promise will be kept to the 'T', including: first person singular, possessive, AND plural. As a side-note, according to a quick Google search, "to the 'T'" is short for "to the tittle," which is an older expression. A tittle apparently refers to a minuscule stroke or mark, particularly the dot above an 'i'. So it's not about crossing 'T's like you might have thought, but it IS about dotting 'i's. Weird how that works.

Language and it's evolution is pretty interesting, isn't it? All gradual change is, for that matter, but language is something very fluid and easy to spot. Consider that phrase "to the tittle." Over a hundred years or so, it became "to the 'T'" (according to trusty Google.) But how did that happen? When did one person, out of nowhere, invent a phrase, and have the entire culture use it, to the point where most people have no idea what it was originally meant to abridge? Or go back a step: somewhere, at some point in time, someone was trying to convey the idea of "very precise", and came up with the phrase "to the tittle." He/she used it in a conversation, someone else heard it, started using it in more conversations, etc. Somehow, that grew into a household phrase, but I doubt the originator was given any credit, or even realized what was happening. Or go back a much bigger leap. English grew out of Old English (which, as anyone who's tried reading it can attest, is almost completely illegible.) But there was never a definite moment when everyone voted and decided to use new words in lieu of old ones. Most people, probably, would have hated that idea of change. But slowly people just started pronouncing things differently, hearing them pronounced by native speakers of other languages, and gradually it just shifted.

It's like a game of telephone, but instead of just going from person to person, it's going from generation to generation. Everything starts out clear and easy to the person at the beginning of the line, but by the end it's completely scrambled. As an example, here's a line you might recognize: "Si thin nama gehalgod." It started in maybe 1000 A.D., and passed on through, say, 25 generations. Now it's 1500 A.D.,and a person is saying "Be thy name hallowed." 5 or 6 generations later, a scribe is writing in the King James Bible "Hallowed be thy name." Of course, it's a line from the Lord's Prayer (Old English translation couresty, again, of google). Something happened. Aside from "si" becoming "be" and the words being rearranged, you can still hear traces of the original. It's just been scrambled, passed through the telephone, each time slightly misheard.

Dawkins has this idea of the "meme": an idea, which exists and propagates through societies the same way a gene propagates through generations. They are born (invented/coined), reproduce (spread from person to person), and mutated (like the Lord's Prayer above). All the ideas about natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc. seem like they fit memes too. the difference between that and genetics, of course, is that a child can't pass his genes onto a parent. But people can go back and forth, letting the genes mutate and mutate; like the above game of telephone, but in a circle, instead of a line. It's only an analogy. But it's a pretty powerful one.

The existence of "fads" or a "Zeitgeist" is really a pretty amazing thing. Every person is an independent agent, but somehow in society, it seems that everyone changes at once. A certain thing becomes "cool" or likeable, another thing becomes ugly or stupid. A political sentiment that older generations wouldn't ever relate to, newer ones do. A politician who loses one election, might win the next 4 years later, even if he hasn't changed at all. Ideas and feelings, like language, spread through groups of people, and, for lack of a better word, mutate. All with people who don't feel the sway. Like a stream of water, which is made up of individual molecules colliding randomly at high speeds; but it still flows and moves through a specific course. The spread of anything, from Chuck Norris jokes being funny to Democrats beating out Republicans in the elections, is the same. Each person is making decisions on his/her own, but over time, huge, clear trends can be tracked, put on a graph, and seen as smooth. Individuals are unpredictable, but groups are slow and obvious. It's the same old idea of meaning arising out of chaos, but in a new guise.

That's all folks. And just for the record, the topic of this post (or any post) was not planned. It really did come from looking up what "to the 'T'" meant, and the super lame Planes Trains and Automobiles title added at the end. So if the segways seem lame, you can blame train-of-thought associations. But hopefully they're not too lame. No 1st person, by the way. Success!