Doomscrolling Memes

and other current progeny of the English language

I’m guessing it was in high school that I became aware of the association of the word gay with men who were attracted to other men. The dictionary recognized gay as slang for homosexuality as early as 1951. It wasn’t until somewhat later that my willingness to use the word in it’s more traditional and dominant (then) meaning morphed into an uncomfortable sense of “no longer appropriate” and I would look for substitutes when thinking or talking about someone in a generally cheery mood. Five decades later, I still wonder if the pendulum might swing back towards the former usage within my lifetime.

As a child, I understood dope to mean someone with limited motivation and/or intellectual capacity. Then, there was the verb associated with electronics; “doping” of components to change their electrical properties on a circuit board. In high-school, I learned that dope equated to illicit drugs, except for marijuana, which was “weed”. I think dope still can apply to drugs, but now it apparently also means cool, excellent, or something similar. A few users will even use the word as a synonym for “inside information”. One has to know with whom one is speaking in order to choose the correct usage of the word.

Remember that word phat? It came and went pretty quickly. Or, maybe it’s circulating in places I don’t frequent. Just as well, because it had nothing to do with one’s BMI.

In 2010, the word “mansplaining” was the New York Times word of the year. It’s origin in modern speech was only two years prior. It’s not hard to guess the meaning; it’s a desultory reference to the tendency of men to explain things in terms considered insulting to women. It doesn’t suggest malicious intent, but more of an inherent character trait common to men. Now I have a vague sense of unease whenever I am in conversation with a woman that I might be inadvertently “mansplaining” when all I intended was to clarify how I am thinking about something. I wonder if the English language is becoming a bit of a social minefield for those of us on the longer side of the age demographic?

It seems that the political cycle has become a 24/7 never-ending contact sport. At many levels of government, fundraising and campaigning begin the day after the last election. In this particular cycle, one candidate for president declared a full two years ago and never actually stopped holding rallies even though he lost the last election four years ago. He raised funds overtly and agressively long before anyone else had even declared their candidacy. So, the vernacular associated with political activity has been under constant pressure to evolve and keep pace with the behavior of the candidates and the electorate. In the particular context of THIS political cycle, a term has arisen, fortunately self explanatory, to help us interpret what we are reading; sane-washing. Remember Huckleberry Finn, for whom whitewashing a fence had deeper layers of meaning? Sane-washing is such an apt description for the activity of the mainstream media, particularly that part owned by oligarchs.

Can you be accused of doomscrolling? Apparently, it is a stepchild of the internet, social media and the COVID pandemic. First coined in 2018, it achieved popularity in 2020 and easily transferred it’s initial target to the 2024 national election cycle as the pandemic waned and the political news cycle accelerated. Doomscrolling is a recent manifestation of our tendency towards free-floating anxiety, incessently searching for new information that either refutes or reinforces something about which we have a basic sense of fear. The internet and social media reinforce this tendency by orders of magnitude, not unlike the addictive tendency of the platform formerly known as twitter, or tik-tok, to pre-teens. You can’t doomscroll about meadows full of flowers, kittens and puppies, rosy cheeked babies, though. It has to be something forboding.

One way of dealing with the increasingly bizarre and outrageous behavior of the pols is through parody and other brief reactions that “fit”into the brevity of social media platforms, texts and other abbreviated forms of communication. Per Perplexity AI, my current favorite search application;

The term "meme" was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In this context, Dawkins used "meme" to describe a unit of cultural transmission or imitation, analogous to a gene in biological evolution. He defined it as an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.

Entry into Common Language

• First Dictionary Entry: The word "meme" entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1998, marking its recognition as a term in the English language. This was more than two decades after its initial introduction by Dawkins.

• Internet Memes: The concept evolved significantly with the rise of the internet. The term "Internet meme" was first used by Mike Godwin in 1993, referring to ideas and jokes that spread online. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, memes began to take on their contemporary form, often represented as humorous images or videos shared widely across social media platforms.

• Mainstream Popularity: The usage of "meme" expanded rapidly in the 2010s as social media became integral to communication. By this time, memes had become a staple of online culture, often used to convey humor or social commentary.

Meme appears to be another word born of the internet, made popular by the use of social media and now a new form of political speech, usually as an immediate viral sort of gallows-humor response to the proclamations of politically prominent individuals.

So, doomscolling memes actually describes something I am prone to do if I don’t consciously check my behavior during my generous doses of daily screen time. I am increasingly aware of the secondary effects of sipping, even guzzling at this fountain of information, largely unedited or curated, that I can fall into at the slightest provocation. In fact, clickbait (yet another term spawned to describe the internet and behavior of commercial interests) is a common entry point into endless scrolling, often leading to doomscrolling. Memes are perfect doomscrolling content, as they add micro-boluses of dopamine stimulation to pleasure centers in the brain, right next to the “fight or flight” centers. Interestingly, this may be the one circumstance in which we actually are in control of the on-off switch to this addictive tendency; it’s the on-off switch on our devices (new word to encompass smart watches, phones, pads, laptops, desktops, now even smart-glasses. We’d be better off if they had built-in on-time limits, after which they would not turn on again for substantial intervals.

As a child, during reading lessons, I vaguely recall extracting lists of words from assigned reading to which I was tasked with applying definitions from a dictionary. Now, being “of a certain age”, I might be excused for not knowing the latest vernacular, hot off the press in periodicals I don’t read, but for which I am still responsible if I wish to converse with my own son and his friends. Thank God for those AI assisted search engines! There’s hope that I can keep up until dementia overtakes me or even better, I wake up one morning in a new dimension altogether.

Are you as confused as I am? will I be relegated to using “search” constantly to be able to interpret what I am hearing and reading in English, the language of my birth? The older I get, the more I seem to be straining to keep abreast of the basic tools of common discourse, not to mention popular culture (which is less and less relevant to me, by the way). Who knows, maybe I’m ready for placement in a planned retirement community, where I can age in place amongst people who still speak my language, and graduate to higher and higher levels of assistance until I am ready, like a nice potted plant, for transplantation into the soil.