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Topic: Is "Hello" a meme? (Read 1367 times) |
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Matt Arnold
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Is "Hello" a meme?
« on: 2004-05-24 17:25:13 » |
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Does a greeting count as a meme? When people hear it, they feel that it is an invitation to respond by reproducing it.
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He believed in a door. The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
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brack
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Re:Is "Hello" a meme?
« Reply #1 on: 2004-05-24 18:16:29 » |
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I would say it is. Competing memes might be warily avoiding others or poking them with pointed sticks. The greeting meme would include other words used in greetings: hey, how ya doin', wuzzup, pleased to meet you, etc..
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Sheldor
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Re:Is "Hello" a meme?
« Reply #3 on: 2004-12-15 06:48:20 » |
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In my opinion there is no reason not to postpone that greeting "hello" is a meme, as so as genes there is no border of length (or complexity) from which we say it is a gene.
I think that every word in natural language is a meme itself. And these memes compete between each other of the frequency of usage. So words that are more simple and "better for usage" will have benefit above the others and they will replace not so good words fo the same meaning. For example word "meme" itself is very good meme - because it has spread very fast and is widely used now.
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Sat
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Re:Is "Hello" a meme?
« Reply #4 on: 2005-04-12 11:26:08 » |
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The use of the word hello paralells the adoption of the technology of the telephone. Popular mythology holds that Thomas Alva Edison first uttered the word while testing saying, "Hello, Alexander Graham Bell, are you listening?", while Alexander Graham Bell's had suggested "ahoy" as the greeting to be uttered.
Bell himself resisted the meme hello, despite it's spread, insisting on saying ahoy in greeting when he answered the phone.
Before the adoption of hello, folks said things like hullo or good day in greeting, hello itself being specific to the technology of the phone.
In the case of the word hello, I'd say that yes it's a meme. According to the lexicon a meme is, "A contagious information pattern that replicates by symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern."
The interesting thing for me regarding the hello meme is that it illustrates how the 'medium is the message' in that new technologies both create and facillitate the spread of new memes.
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Hello - 883, alt. of hallo (1840), itself an alt. of holla, hollo, a shout to attract attention, first recorded 1588. Perhaps from holla! "stop, cease." Popularity as a greeting coincides with use of the telephone, where it won out over Alexander Graham Bell's suggestion, ahoy. Central telephone exchange operators were known as hello-girls (1889). - http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hello
See also: http://www.4to40.com/QA/index.asp?counter=45&category=science
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David Lucifer
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Re:Is "Hello" a meme?
« Reply #5 on: 2005-04-12 12:00:36 » |
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This reminds me of a potential memetic experiment I would like to conduct. The goal would be to replace the greeting "hello" with "halo", initially targetting the christian community but perhaps it could spread from there.
Can you think of some catchy .sigs or chain letters to get this going? It would also be very interesting to save the originals here so we can track mutations.
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