Before answering this clickbaity title, I am going to tell you a story about socks. Don’t worry, I’m getting somewhere with this and I promise you that you will in all likelihood learn something interesting from this article.

The other day, I found some cute made-in-Tunisia socks, which you can see on the cover of this article. You most likely get the reference for that meme. In case you don’t, I am going to kindly explain it. A few months ago, a new word became extremely trendy in Tunisia: عكعك.

What does it meme? 

Rumors suggest that this new word originated in Sbitla, where a man named “Âkâak” was killed in an accident after the « evil eye » hit him. This incident led the word “Âkâak »to becoming widely known as a bad omen. If someone envies you, and they want to explicitly “give their evil eye” they will say it. It is, however, mostly used jokingly.

In addition to being used by everyday people, (even my mom!) It is all over TikTok and YouTube now. Several videos showing catastrophes happening to people soon after someone shouts “âkâak” are displayed on these platforms: from upturned wheelbarrows to injured people and the list is endless.

What is a meme?

This is the section where I will be defining the concept of a meme. The origin of a social meme -often unknown as it spreads from mouth to ear- was interpreted by Merriam-Webster as the following:

“While memes today are recognized as amusing or interesting items that spread widely through the internet, the word itself dates to the 1970s. Originally ‘memes’ were conceptualized as units of cultural transfer, and could be boiled down to ‘ideas that catch on and pass between people via culture.’” Merriam-Webster.

To be more precise than the Merriam-Webster definition, the word meme first occurred in the 1976 book “The selfish gene” by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He came up with the word by combining the ancient Greek word mimeme –meaning something imitated- with the English word gene. 

The meme mutation:

A meme is to a culture what a virus is to living or computing hosts: the meme will only spread if its host, or in this case a social human, carries it on.

If we go back to our original example, the word “âkâak”, we see that it all started with someone using it to summon the evil eye, then it spread from person to person much like how a virus would.

We can apply this concept to every viral meme you’ve come across. For instance, someone someday was watching Spongebob, and for some preposterous reasons, they came upon this famous episode and found the idea of the rainbow very interesting. They then used it as a reference in a picture.

But memes have another property that resembles viruses: they mutate. The reference originally said “Imagination”, how did it change? Well, it simply mutated!

Words are memes?

We can’t help but notice this repeating cycle: invention by humans then spreading then mutating.

Following this reasoning, words can be considered to be memes: all words have been invented by someone and spread through society. The words will mutate according to the language or accent used (among other factors).

In our socks example, the origin is actually tragic if we were to believe the rumor. Yet the meaning of the word mutated to become a joke after spreading. Think about it like the children’s game Chinese whispers; also known by its Arabic name « Chnowa howa? » The story will almost inevitably change at the end of the line. That is how memes mutate and that’s how new words are made: through a meme pandemic!

Thus, everything is a meme, words are memes, you’re a meme and your life’s a meme as well.

That’s it for today. If you came here hoping for me to talk about superstition, I didn’t have that on the menu but you can educate yourself on the evil eye, which is also a kind of meme that is referred to as “old wives’ tales”. You should know however that this reference only explains it from an Islamic point of view since that is the culture it is most associated with. I highly encourage you to find other sources and to form your own opinion on the matter.

Reference: The copyright to “what does it meme” goes to a series of YouTube videos made by one of my favorite YouTube channels. Check it out, it depicts phrases and phenomenons that were popularized by the cinematic industry.