4 ms·
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by defaulting to assuming "meme" means the biological definition. The "correct" definition of a word is however most
by tw1010 9y ago
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by defaulting to assuming "meme" means the biological definition. The "correct" definition of a word is however most people use it, not whatever internal definition you yourself have in your mind, nor whatever the dictionary happens to say.
- eivarv 9y agoThat's the descriptivist view anyway.
- bloak 9y agoIt's not that simple. Sometimes people use a word in one or several ways, while expecting other people to use it in one or several different ways. And it hardly ever makes sense to count all people equally: you're probably more interested in how the people you personally communicate with use or understand a word than with how millions of people in a different country might use or understand the word. And lots of people speak several varieties of a language, or have different registers for different social situations. It can all get very complex, but a thorough lexicographer will attempt to understand and describe that complexity, rather than claim they can solve it all with some kind of majority vote. The concept of "correctness" exists in the heads of many speakers and is part of the linguistic reality that should be understood and described along with everything else.
- Retra 9y agoThere is no single correct definition for any word. And most people use words to that effect.