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Trivia

All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

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Meme

Monkey do.

Dear Word Detective:  What is a meme?  — Sally Purdy.

Oh, what isn’t a meme?  My spellchecker may not recognize the word (way to go, Open Office), but you can’t spend more than ten minutes on the internet before you’re knee-deep in “memes,” or what are labeled as such by the other netizens.  By the way, whatever became of “netizen”?  Of all the dippy coinages cooked up in the mid-1990s “internet evangelism” dementia, “netizen” (supposedly a combination of “internet” and “citizen”), meaning someone who, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it delicately, “uses the Internet, especially habitually,” was among the lamest (and quite possibly the most vacuously self-important).  I always preferred “mouse potato” myself.

I was kidding about the encyclopedic and omnivorous scope of the term “meme,” but the definition of the term offered by the OED certainly covers a lot of territory:  “A cultural element or behavioral trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (especially imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.”  In practical terms, “memes” include ideas, rumors, catch phrases (such as the Seinfeldian “not that there’s anything wrong with that”), particular fashions (tattoos, baseball hats worn backwards), tunes or snatches of music (e.g., the old Dragnet “dum dee-DUM-dum”), urban legends (such as “Eskimos have 1000 words for snow”), traditional remedies (“beefsteak cures a black eye”), bizarre legal myths (“undercover cops are not allowed to deny they’re cops”), superstitions, dietary biases (e.g., pork as “unclean,” Brussels sprouts as “good for you”), more rumors, fads, prejudices, things we all know are true but aren’t, and LOLcats.  Just about everything that makes life fun, in other words.

The key to a “meme,” what separates a “meme” from a simple personal quirk, preference or fixation, lies in its transmission between people.  “Memeticists,” who are apparently paid to study the phenomenon of “memes,” hold that “memes” propagate through human society in roughly the same way that genetic traits and mutations spread.  “Memes” can, in this view, be inherited, transmitted, modified, and culled by natural selection just like hair color or height.

“Meme” is one of those rare new words that were definitely coined by an identifiable person, in this case by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene,” published in 1976.  Dawkins explained that he derived “meme” by shortening the Greek word  “mimeme,” meaning “that which is imitated,” and even stipulated that his new word should rhyme with “cream.”  Hmm.  I suddenly have the irresistible urge to start an internet rumor that the proper pronunciation of “meme” is “mim-MAY.”

So, in practical terms, a “meme” is something that you notice two or more unrelated people doing, saying, singing, dancing, wearing, eating or believing.  Pass it on.

Trainwreck

Of course, back then we actually had railroads.

Dear Word Detective:  On a recent episode of “Mad Men,” a person was referred to as a “trainwreck.”  That usage seemed anachronistic to me.  When did “trainwreck” start to mean a person whose life was out of control? — James E. Powell.

Good question.  I must admit that I haven’t been watching “Mad Men,” an AMC network series about the advertising industry in New York City in the early 1960s (which was largely centered on Madison Avenue, thus the “Mad”).  I did catch part of one early episode, but it gave me a creepy “trying much too hard” vibe that made it unwatchable for me.  “Mad Men” could use a dose of Stan Freberg.

Picking out the anachronisms on Mad Men has become a cottage industry among its more obsessive fans (just Google “Mad Men anachronisms”), but most “catches” seem to have to do with typography (fonts invented in the 1990s) and wallpaper patterns.  The only one that really jumped out at me as a major blooper was the show’s use of 1970s-vintage IBM Selectric II typewriters in the office scenes.  Of course, if that’s the worst that the nitpickers can come up with, chances are good that there aren’t any really egregious verbal anachronisms lurking in the show’s scripts.

And so it would seem in the case of the use of “trainwreck,” although the exact vintage of that expression is hard to pin down.  My first reaction, like yours, was that it must be an anachronism.  I don’t remember hearing a person called a “trainwreck” until at least the late 1970s or early 1980s, and even then, as I recall, it was the kind of usage one encountered in press coverage of Hollywood (“Friends described the star as a ‘trainwreck’ after her divorce”), rather than the sort of thing you’d use in casual conversation.  At least one dictionary of slang also dates the term to the 1980s.

But then I searched the archives of ADS-L, the mailing list of the American Dialect Society, and discovered that back in 2005 linguist Ben Zimmer had posted an excerpt from a 1953 Washington Post article about the jargon of the TV industry.  In between “goulash” (a variety show) and “face factory” (the make-up room) was “train wreck,” meaning a TV show that was, for whatever reason, “a mess.”  It seems reasonable to assume that if a figurative use of “train wreck” to mean “mess” was TV jargon common enough to be included in a glossary in the early 1950s, the subsequent ten years until the period of “Mad Men” would be plenty of time for the term to migrate to Madison Avenue and be applied to an individual.

So while “trainwreck” didn’t become common in popular slang until at least the late 1970s, it’s not impossible that someone in the advertising industry would have used it in the 1960s.  Of course, we’ll probably never know whether the show’s writers actually knew that or simply dropped “trainwreck” into the script without thinking.

Gams

Leg in the door.

Dear Word Detective:  Where did the slang term “gams” for women’s legs originate? — B.D.

That’s a good question, and it just gave me an idea (oh no, here he goes again).  If we can have a “Talk Like a Pirate Day” every September 19th (and apparently we can), why can’t we have a “Talk Like a Gumshoe Day” every year?  It would be much more fun than just peppering every sentence with “Avast!” and “Arrgh!”  We could use words like “gat” and “stiff” and “heater” and “patsy”!  We could wear trench coats and fedoras!  What’s not to like?

There are actually three “gams” in English, and they all have separate sources.  The oldest is of Scottish origin, is used only in the plural, and means “‘large teeth or tusks.”  This usage first appeared around 1500, and seems to be largely defunct, although the use of “gam” to mean “mouth” in general was still in use in the 19th century.  The origin of this “gam” is uncertain, but it may be related to the Scots word “gamp,” meaning “to eat greedily.”

The second sort of “gam,” dating to the mid-19th century, means “a herd or school of whales” (or, by extension, “a social meeting of whalers at sea”).  This “gam” is thought to be a dialectical variant of the familiar English word “game,” probably drawn from the playful behavior of a group of whales.

All of which brings us to the third kind of “gams,” slang for a woman’s legs, especially if regarded as attractive.  “Gam” in this sense probably reminds most people of the “noir” crime novels and films of the 1930s and 40s and the hardboiled patois of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain (“The gams!  The gams!  Your face ain’t news!”, Mildred Pierce, 1941).  But “gam” in this sense is actually considerably older than Sam Spade, dating back to at least the late 18th century.  And “gam,” which began as underworld slang, originally referred to the leg of either sex, and not necessarily an attractive one.

There are two theories about the origin of “gam” meaning “leg.”  The shorter and more straightforward one simply traces it to the Italian word “gamba,” also meaning “leg.”

The other theory treads the same ground, but with a detour, tracing “gam” to the old word “gamb,” meaning the representation of a leg on a coat of arms, which comes from the French “gambe,” a close cousin of that Italian “gamba.”  Interestingly, another form of “gambe” in French was “jambe,” which gave us our modern English word “jamb,” as in “door jamb,” the supporting side pieces of a door frame.  The connection between a door “jamb” and the “leg” meaning of “gam” and its relatives may seem murky, but the “jambs” were named because they serve as “legs” supporting the lintel, the piece at the top of the door frame.  Even a door frame, it seems, needs legs to stand on.