Trend Watch

Meme

After a phrase from the presidential debate went viral ...

When:

Lookups spiked on October 17, 2012, after the second presidential debate.

Why:

When Mitt Romney's phrase "whole binders full of women" inspired a range of online parodies, "binders" was dubbed the Internet "meme" of the moment.

For example, according to a headline on the Today show's website, "'Binders Full of Women,' other Internet memes trump voter issues."

A meme is "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." It comes from the Greek word that means "to imitate" and was formed by analogy to the word gene by the scientist Richard Dawkins in 1976: just as a gene is a unit of biological information, a meme is a unit of cultural information.


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