Look, here's a meme: All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

Here's another one: In God We Trust.

And here's a third: Memes are used by people like Chris Locke to control things "we" care about.

That last meme is being spread by Dave Winer. The same Dave Winer who hates memes. The same Dave Winer who freely admits to not having read Chris Locke's book, and who therefore has no idea what Chris Locke is or is not "trying to take control of." This represents either gross stupidity or flagrant intellectual dishonesty. I don't believe Dave is stupid.

I never set out to defend or deprecate the use of the word "meme." It's just a word in the current lexicon, and I used as it's generally used by reasonably informed people: to talk about the cultural transmission of ideas. I've given two dictionary definitions in previous posts here. Whatever Winer thinks the word means, his definition seems to have nothing to do with what the editors of the Merriam-Webster and The American Heritage dictionaries think it means. As to how my using it somehow brands me as his enemy... to me, this smacks of genuine paranoia.

It also reminds of another non-conversation from Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass:

"There's glory for you!"

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'"

Yeah, there's glory for you!