Matthew Yglesias had a post yesterday asking why people, including I guess me, use the word “meme”. For me, it basically does just mean idea, but there’s a deliberate connotation that it is an idea whose spread is more or less viral, rather than something that has spread by what I like to think of as rational methods. To take one prominent example.

Eugene Volokh linked to this apparently amusing graphic of a Google page showing that a search for French military victories revealed no hits, and asking if the author wanted to search for French military defeates instead. There’s been this idea (meme?) running around the right blog-predicament recently that the French are awful at war. Since the French seem to be doing pretty well for themselves in most respects nowadays, you could be forgiven for wondering why this doesn’t lead to a thought that war is a wee bit overrated. Reading the official history of the French military from east blogland (helpfully mirrored by a not-so-right site), and reflecting on how powerful and prosperous France currently is, you’d think the French slogan should be A few more defeats like this and we shall rule the world. But let that pass.

(Well, don’t let it pass quite so quickly. The right-wing discussion of French military history reminded me of nothing so much as the discussion of church teaching in Grace. In both cases the unintentional humour index is reaching Steinbrennerian heights.)

Anyway, the Google screenshot was obviously a joke, and I’m pleased in a Benthamite way that some people were amused by it. What I was more amused by was that people are apparently taking it as fact. So here’s Geoff Metcalf writing in Newsmax.com

A friend recently sent me an amusing item that prompted some follow-up research. If you go to a search engine like www.google.com and type in the query “French Military Victories,” guess what you get?

Type in Geoff Metcalf and you’ll get 9,700. Try George Bush and you get overwhelmed with 2,570,000. But for “French military victories,” zero, zilch, nada …

Now that, folks, is a meme.

Is it possible that Metcalf is being deliberately sarcastic/ironic here? I mean, it’s possible, but it’s a very odd, and oddly specific way to do so, if he is so doing. Is it possible he knows this is wrong and is intentionally lying? Well, that wouldn’t be the case. Would it? Was he just too lazy to do the search? The mind boggles.

So the philosophically interesting questions are these.

First, what is a ‘viral’-like spread of an idea rather than a rational spead? Auntie thinks that when I call a method of idea-transmission viral, I just mean that I disapprove of it. Auntie is very reductionist some days.

Secondly, is it part of the meaning of “meme” that it spreads virally, or just an implicature? I guess the latter, but I have no clear answer.