Sloppy's Journal: We have to destroy the language to save it

While I usually try to be nice, I know I'll always have at least a little taste for wrath and vengeance. I prefer to build, but sometimes I have an urge to destroy. And this "meme" abuse has got me thinking.

George Jetson's gay old time was rudely interrupted by someone calling him a homosexual. This wrong was never righted, but it was avenged. Gay farmland was salted, gay wells were poisoned, and gay huts were burned, for: as early as the mid 1980s, I saw the word "gay" used as a generic pejorative. A fellow student objected to a homework assignment, and exclaimed "that's so gay!" He was thrown out of the classroom by a teacher who, while correctly identifying the student as disrespectful, probably incorrectly thought he was being accused of putting his tab into the wrong slot. The point is, gay took on a generic usage. If George Jetson can't have a gay old time, then nobody else can, either.

We lost the battle on "hacker" so let's deny it to everyone. Let the word henceforth mean, "any bad person." Hitler wasn't just gay; Hitler was a gay hacker.

I'm not 100% sure that the battle for "meme" is really lost, but it probably is. I'm thinking we could use it to just mean any sort of communication.

First meme!

[Sloppy]

First meme!

Re:First meme!

[ellem]

<sarcasm>
damn! how'd you beat me to this?
</sarcasm>

Re:First meme!

[daniil]

Hitler, a gay hacker, was a master of memes.

I have an idea

[daniil]

...for a new meme (a real one). It'd be a sort of a viral .sig: in the .sig, the word 'meme' should be associated with something negative. At first, the .sigs should be short and simple -- for example, "Hitler's meme", or "'Meme' means Murder!" Or "Meme Holocaust". Later on, you (ie the person using such a .sig) could move on to longer and more complex .sigs where the word 'meme' would already be used in such a context that it would mean something negative by itself (Pink Floyd reference: "We don't need no

Point

[LPetrazickis]

"Hacker" isn't a generic insult. It is being turned into something that's kin to "gangster", but with less of a romantic veneer. "Thug", which derives from Sanskrit for "to conceal" is an interesting comparison.