{"id":7273,"date":"2018-05-15T19:20:12","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T17:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/?post_type=stsp_text&p=7273"},"modified":"2020-11-23T12:57:09","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T11:57:09","slug":"meme","status":"publish","type":"stsp_text","link":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/text\/meme\/","title":{"rendered":"MeMe"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have various private theories which strike me as true. That fire is the birth of consciousness. Or rather, when people first tamed it, gathered round it, spent evenings staring at this stuff that held their gaze, whose patterns shape-shifted their way into our ancestors\u2019 cognition, that these pauses from forage and hunt \u2013 this down-time from th\u2019anthropocene hustle, communing with flame, wondering as we blink through the reels of after-image \u2013 these<\/em> intervals represent our first grappling with the awareness, as we think, that we\u2019re thinking.<\/p>\n

Maybe, round the fire, someone starting humming, or got up and mimed the throes of a just-speared aurochs. Smeared the juice of a berry on her finger, or banged a stick on a hollow piece of wood \u2013 instead of delousing a neighbour\u2019s scalp, they tried a different sort of grooming. More conscious, social.<\/p>\n

Another theory: an old lady stopping in the middle of the pavement and looking back is like an aged elephant hanging at the rear of the group, the matriarch saving the calves by presenting her wrinkled hind to the jackals testing the herd\u2019s perimeter. So, next time, don\u2019t get annoyed having to sidestep the old girl clamped to her Zimmer frame; when she stops and turns back, she\u2019s just doing her evolutionary duty. In a word, autogerontopachydermicide.<\/p>\n

Or my theory that the contagiousness of yawning is a response evolved to protect the group from all falling asleep at once. Yawning wakes you up. When someone yawns and you find yourself yawning in sympathy\u2026 well, you find yourself. A group of mammals helping each other to survive by triggering and thereby linking their sympathetic nervous systems. Unconscious grooming. I like to think of it as \u2018Me Too\u2019 in a good way. So someone from the circle yawns, another bestirs herself to stoke the fire, and the sabre-tooths slink away, unsated. Shared awareness keeps you from being food. Stops you being chewed, dude.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean \u2018grooming\u2019 in the Weinsteinian or ISIS-recruitment-tactic sense. And I\u2019m trying to use \u2018Me Too\u2019 in a different sense as well (although the memory of squirming off the school caretaker\u2019s lap just as his gardening-rough fingers had got halfway down my hairless pubis does make me hopeful for the hashtag\u2019s potential). I mean \u2018grooming\u2019 as a social, reciprocal, mutual phenomenon.\u00a0 Like you\u2019d do with a horse.<\/p>\n

My \u2018Me Too\u2019 is more of a pun on \u2018meme\u2019 (\u2018me me\u2019 or \u2018me two\u2019) because the biggest personal theory I have is that I created a word. Or rather a meaning, that propagated outward and added a little to our propensity towards the dumb. If the human dance is an ocean, then I<\/em> helped to introduce a nubbin of toxic, unbreakdownable plastic into its social swirl.<\/p>\n

When I was 13, I delivered newspapers. I\u2019d see the same headline 50 times, every morning between 7 and 8. Elvis is Dead<\/em> when I was just starting. A couple of years after that, Brezhnev is Dead<\/em> and later, Eric Morecambe is Dead<\/em>. Now it would be Bowie, Lemmy, Mark E. Smith, Coco Schumann but, hey, that\u2019s progress. As Kafka says, \u201cThe meaning of life is that it ends.\u201d Notice I said \u201csays\u201d?<\/p>\n

The back pages, which I\u2019d also see 50 times as I folded each newspaper, were given over to columns of adverts: back-pain relief, ventriloquy manuals, crystal healing, whoopee cushions, the Charles Atlas bodybuilding method (guaranteed to make your lady friend go wet at the knees), remedies for wedding-speech nerves, soothing tinctures for cyclists, guides to good writing. I replied to one of these small ads once: an offer of 250 stickers, 1\u00bd cm by 3\u00bd, with (and this was the killer punch) your<\/em> choice of wording. I ordered black lettering on a white background. Delivery within 28 days. Capital letters. 6-point Times New Roman, typeset by hand. And the phrase I chose? \u2018Slap my buttocks with a red-hot poker\u2019.<\/p>\n

In that pre-graffiti age, these stickers became my tag. With a 13-year-old\u2019s unassailable conviction that his every pronouncement was hilarious, I undertook to plaster Slap my buttocks with a red-hot poker all over. On buses, trains and lampposts, on school desks, \u2018No Parking\u2019 signs and across the foreheads of shop mannequins, on windows, bird-feeders and (my particular favourite) prams.<\/p>\n

Of course, I soon had the school covered, helped by similarly annoying 13-year olds who thought the slogan\u2019s hilarity self-evident. I even got another set printed, this time in white lettering on a gold background, which I gave out to some of my more enthusiastic distributors, as a way both of widening \u2018meme-reach\u2019 and of spreading the risk of any potential outing of me as the primum mobile <\/em>of the enterprise.<\/p>\n

I realised I\u2019d achieved what the marketing department of Nike would nowadays call \u2018cut-through\u2019 when fellow students started saying, as an expression variously of surprise, disbelief or sheer pubescent frustration, \u201cWell, slap me!\u201d Other manifestations, like \u201cYou could\u2019ve slapped me with a brick\/stick\/ feather\/truck,\u201d never caught on, presumably from semantic considerations or a certain forcedness about the prosody, but it was when my younger sister paradigm-shifted to a noun form \u2013 saying of one of my friends, \u201cHe\u2019s a bit of a slapper,\u201d \u2013 that full lexico-viral immanence was attained.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlapper\u201d was an essentially meaningless epithet and could be applied to anyone in any context. Someone overdosing on Bacardi at a party could be \u201ca right slapper\u201d. Or a sanctimonious neighbour holding your football to ransom. \u201cShe\u2019s not gonna give it back, the slapper.\u201d A ferrety shop assistant or a pensioner fumbling in her purse ahead of you in the queue. The term\u2019s vagueness and versatility gave it a short shelf-life when used within a circumscribed network \u2013 say, of suburban teenage idiots \u2013 but it was perhaps this very connotative slipperiness that gave \u201cslapper\u201d the legs to adapt to a wider usage, especially when this process was aided by the Proustian mental kick of people seeing it on stickers everyfuckinwhere.<\/p>\n

I have no way of knowing the exact point where its meaning became fixed \u2013 referring to a female whose behaviour had been judged by her peers as morally questionable. Somewhere along the line, connotation became denotation, and the word was pressganged into that body of language which, while appearing to denote a certain kind of person, in fact showed the quality of mind of the person using the word rather than any supposed characteristics of the referent.<\/p>\n

So, in terms of a theory that strikes me as true, I do feel in part responsible for at least a small supporting pillar in the temple of misogyny. A persistent little self-replicating virus, helping to contribute to a public space that would\u2019ve been maybe a touch less crass and unreflective without it. Just another guy, getting in on the act, being the voice, sticking their [ahem<\/em>] in. A meme that was really just me-me. Or metwo<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have various private theories which strike me as true. That fire is the birth of consciousness. Or rather, when people first tamed it, gathered round it, spent evenings staring at this stuff that held their gaze, whose patterns shape-shifted their way into our ancestors\u2019 cognition, that these pauses from forage and hunt \u2013 this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":8850,"template":"","categories":[23,10],"class_list":["post-7273","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-8","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\nMeMe - stadtsprachen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/en\/text\/meme\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale:alternate\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"MeMe - stadtsprachen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I have various private theories which strike me as true. 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