Memes, mimes and genes

Memes have become part of the daily fabric of the internet and social media. It's hard to go a day online without coming across a Distracted Boyfriend, Success Kid or "One does not simply" meme.  In fact if you Google meme today, you will get more than three billion search results. However, despite its prevalence in modern society, you might be surprised to learn the word meme was actually coined 44 years ago.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins created the word in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, introducing the concept as a unit of human culture that is spread from person to person, comparing it to a replicator - the theoretical base unit in the gene-centric idea of evolution. He was even kind enough to outline the etymology and the correct pronunciation for us:

"We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.  If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'." 

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."

So there you have it. Dawkins created the word meme from the Greek mimeme, 'something that is imitated' (also the root of the verb 'to mime') and gene from the Greek genos meaning 'birth, kind or offspring'. In an interview with Wired, the scientist said he had no issue with the internet's hijacking of the word and highlighted that when he created the concept, he likened memes to a virus, spreading from person to person:

"The meaning is not that far away from the original," he said. "It's anything that goes viral. In that original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use the metaphor of a virus. So when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is."

Beating, bombardment and batteries

Perhaps it might sound obvious but the word battery, the thing that powers your laptop or phone, is related to the same word meaning unlawful physical contact and a cluster of cannons.

To go right to the beginning, battery can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European word bhāt- meaning 'to beat or hit'. The word with the same meaning emerged in Latin as batteure and made its way into Old French as battre and batterie, meaning 'the action of beating', before producing related words such as battle and combat. Interestingly, batterie still exists in modern French today as something that is beaten in the form of 'drums' or 'drum kit'.

A 'batterie' is a drum kit in modern French.

Battery appeared in English as batry or battry, meaning an unlawful attack or a bruise left from a beating, from the 16th century. Around the same time it was also used to refer to a bombardment or to batter the walls of a city by means of artillery. This led to battery being used in the sense of a unit of artillery weapons or a cluster of cannons.

A battery of cannons in Newfoundland, Canada.

However, we have the American inventor Benjamin Franklin to thank for the modern use of the word battery in technology. He first used the term "electrical battery" in 1748 in a letter to Peter Collinson, a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, with whom he shared details about his experiments. Franklin apparently borrowed the military term because his invention contained glass Leyden jars grouped in rows like cannons in an artillery battery. 

Franklin's "electrical battery" of Leyden jars.

Batteries have come a long way since those first rudimentary contraptions but given that modern Lithium Ion batteries have been known to spontaneously explode, in some ways they share even more in common with the units of destructive artillery that gave them their name.

How cookies were baked into web terminology

Apart from SPAM, the other food item that has made its way into tech terminology is the cookie. Before the internet, cookies only came in biscuit-form, normally containing chocolate chips or fortunes, so how did they become part of day-to-day web vernacular?

Being asked to accept cookies is now a standard part of the web browsing user experience.

To start at the beginning, the word cookie comes from the Netherlands, specifically the word koekje, which simply means as 'little cake', from the Dutch word koek meaning 'cake' and the suffix -je to denote something little. Although there is no historical evidence to connect this to the Scottish cookie, a plain round bun that cropped up in the early 1700s and apparently came from the English word 'cook' with the suffix -ie, the Scottish equivalent of the Dutch -je suffix.

"Koekjes" arrived in the United States with the Dutch West India Company in 1624 and the creation of New Amsterdam, the city now called New York, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The spelling had changed to the Anglicised "cookies" by the 1850s, although across the pond in England they were and still are referred to as biscuits from the Old French bescoit and the Latin biscotum meaning 'twice cooked' (bis 'twice' + coctum from coquere 'to cook'), the origin of the Italian biscotti.

The popularity of cookies in the United States continued to rise with the invention of the chocolate chip cookie in 1930 but it was the earlier arrival of the fortune cookie that led to the cookie moving into tech vernacular. It might be a surprise but historical evidence suggests the fortune cookie was a Japanese rather than a Chinese creation and was first sold in the United States by Japanese migrants from the late 1890s to early 1900s. They were later adopted by the Chinese and became a popular after dinner treat in Chinese-American restaurants after the Second World War.

Fortune cookies. Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash

Three decades later, clearly inspired by the fortune cookie, Version 7 of Unix was released in January 1979 with a `fortune` command that would display a joke or saying from a database of quotations when it was run. These were known as fortune cookies or cookie files. Coincidentally the Unix manual would also reference the magic cookie, a token or piece of data that was passed from one program to another, which has led some people to believe it is a reference to fortune cookies.

Despite theories about the origin of the magic cookie being a reference to an LSD-laced cookie or the Cookie Monster, who first appeared on Sesame Street in 1971, the founders of Unix offered an alternative origin. When I emailed Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Doug McIlroy asking where the term came from, they all offered the same response - Robert "Bob" Morris, the Bell Labs cryptographer.

Cryptographer Bob Morris introduced the term 'cookie' to Bell Labs in the 1970s.

Professor McIlroy said the term had been in use in the lab before 1979 and that Morris was the person who introduced cookie into their vocabulary:

"It was usually applied to a very short and enigmatic bit of text. He used the word (cookie) in non-computing contexts too. I do not know whether he coined the usage or picked it up elsewhere. In Bob's usage, "cookie" usually stood alone. I suspect "magic" got attached to it by analogy to the comparable term "magic number", which applies to the data structure at the front of an an a.out file."

Sadly Bob Morris died in 2011, possibly taking the secret to the origin of the magic cookie with him. An unfortunate end to my quest for answers but as with some things in life, sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

How wise men became installation wizards

When you hear the word wizard, it's only natural to think of a magical grandfather figure with a staff and a long grey beard. Depending on your age and reading habits, perhaps Merlin, Gandalf or even Albus Dumbledore come to mind? However at some point wizards left the realms of fantasy for the computing world, specifically to become tools offering users guidance with things like installation. To find out how this happened, it's probably best to start at the beginning.

The earliest form of the word wizard can be traced back to the Middle English wysard, a combination of wys meaning 'wise' and the suffix -ard, a common formative used in nouns that denote people characterised by a specific action or trait (other examples include bastards, cowards and drunkards). So from around the 1440s a wizard was simply a wise man.

Over the next one hundred years wizards would acquire magic powers and started to be mentioned alongside witches and sorcerers. In a sermon in 1562 Hugh Latimerthe, the bishop of Worcester, said: "Whan we be in trouble, or sicknes, or lose any thing: we runne hither and thither to wyssardes, or sorcerers, whome we call wyse men."

Another century later and wizards were people who were skilled at their profession, so "wizards of histories" were historians, while "wizards who painted" were artists. At some point in the 1920s wizard also started to be used as a slang term for 'excellent or marvellous'. However it was the figurative take on the word that transferred into computing in the 1980s when the Hacker's Dictionary, a jargon.txt file maintained at MIT, described a wizard as a hacker or an expert in computing:

"A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works; someone who can find and fix his bugs in an emergency[...] A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people."

The concept of a wizard as tool or user interface to help users install or use software was introduced by Microsoft in 1991. The innovative "Page Wizard" was part of Microsoft Publisher and offered a step-by-step instructional guide that lead users through a series of design options.

The wizard started to crop up in other Microsoft software, assisting with installation, printer setup, internet connection and other things. It was introduced as a new term in the November edition of MacUser magazine in 1992:

"... we'd like you to meet Wizards, step-by-step guides that are designed to walk you through complex tasks."

The wizard was commonplace by the 2000s but today the term is starting to feel old hat and many companies are replacing wizards with assistants instead. Google's is actually called Google Assistant, while other companies have humanized their assistants with names like Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). Sadly it seems the wizards of the 1990s are no longer considered quite so wizard. 

How breasts became browsers

While it is no surprise that some people use web browsers to keep abreast of the news, it might raise a few eyebrows to learn that breast is the most likely etymological origin of the word browser.

Browse can be traced back to the German word brust meaning breast.

Before being mangled in the mists of time, browse germinated from the word brouster, the Middle French for 'to crop and eat young shoots and leaves', stemming from the Old French word brost or broust meaning ‘buds or young shoots’. One theory is the English wrongly mistook the French word broust for past tense so dropped the 't' to make brouse. To go back even further, it has roots in the Old Saxon brustian ‘to bud or sprout’ and the Proto-Germanic breust or brust meaning ‘breast’ from the Proto-Indo-European bhreus- 'to swell'. These words have also resulted in the modern German brust meaning 'breast' and brustwarzen, which translates quite literally to ‘breast warts’, a descriptive if rather inelegant word for nipples. 

The earliest form of browse cropped up in the 15th century as bruse and brouse, referring to both the shoots and leaves eaten by animals, and also the act of eating the vegetation, hence the term browsing. So technically the first browsers were feeding animals like cows and goats but by the mid-16th century, a browser was also a person who cut the foliage for the animals to eat during the winter.

A browsing grey rhebok, a small antelope native to South Africa and Zimbabwe.

A few centuries later, people casually looking through books were compared to cattle lazily grazing, so this activity also became known as browsing and the people doing the browsing became known as browsers. One of the earliest references to browsing in this context appeared in the London Magazine in 1820:

"He brouzes on the husk and leaves of books, as the young fawn browzes on the bark and leaves of trees."

Another hundred years later the word browser made its way into computing with the introduction of an automatic indexing online retrieval system developed by IBM in 1971. This system provided the IBM 2260 with a natural query language and online browsing capabilities. The invention was effectively the grandfather of the modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer that are used by billions of people worldwide today.

The IBM 2260 computer that the first BROWSER was tested on.

Computer scientist John Williams called it the BROWSER, clearly inspired by the verb, but somewhat clumsily claiming it was an acronym for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval. Unfortunately when it comes to naming things, some programmers can be prone to making boobs.

Logs, logins and backlogs

It might sound like an obvious association to make but I doubt many people would connect the terms log files, backlog and login with a chunk of wood despite it being the most likely origin of these words.

To start at the beginning, the root of the word log meaning ‘a bulky mass of wood’ isn't entirely clear. One theory links it to the Swedish låga meaning ‘a fallen tree lying on the ground’ and phonetically it does sound similar. Another theory is that log and the related clog arose from attempts to evoke the sense of something large and heavy. While others have linked it to lug meaning ‘something heavy and clumsy’, from the Dutch word log meaning ‘slow and heavy’. Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree but I think there is probably a case for all three.

The opening line of every episode of Star Trek, “Captain’s log, stardate...”, is perhaps the most famous cultural reference that hints at how log might have drifted into the realm of technology. However the answer isn't space travel but rather the sea or to be more specific, sailing.

"Captain's log stardate XXX" was the opening line for every episode of Star Trek.

A captain's log, or simply a log, was a record of observations or readings that started life on the high seas, specifically as an apparatus used to measure the speed of a ship. Sailors would throw a wooden log or board tied to 150 fathom (900 ft) length of rope overboard and would time how long it took to run out.

These daily recordings of their ship’s speed were kept in a log-book, a term which can be traced back to the 1670s. To untangle the root of another word, sailors would also tie knots in the string tied to the log-line and by counting these knots, were able to give the ship a more precise measurement of speed: knots per hour.

An example of a log and line from the National Maritime Museum.

The log-book is the most logical (from the Greek logos meaning 'reason' - not the wooden log!) answer for how log came to mean a record of performance or progress in technology. The verb to log would arise in the 1880s, initially referring to the entry of a man's name into a log-book for some kind of offence. This would later migrate into computing in the 1960s in the form of login, the act involving a user entering their name to access a computer, as well as logging in and logging out.

The original backlog was a large log placed at the back of a fireplace.

The other type of log that relates to a physical wooden log but with a different origin is the term backlog, meaning an accumulation of uncompleted work or matters to be dealt with. The etymological root of this word lies in the fireplace. Simply put, a backlog was the large log placed at the back of the fire that was intended to "smoulder for days" from the 1680s. The term was later used figuratively to mean 'something in reserve, reserves or an accumulation' by the late 1800s before the meaning changing to 'an arrears of unfulfilled orders or uncompleted work' from the 1930s. So that is the reason we have backlogs but no frontlogs, which I'd imagine would be more prone to rolling out and setting fire to your carpet! 🔥

Gremlins, Goblins and Fremlins

If you asked someone where the word gremlin came from, they would probably refer to the green destructive creatures in the 1984 film Gremlins. However, the story behind the term gremlin is actually much older and more complicated than that and features pilots, beer and even Walt Disney. 

Gremlins singing carols in the 1984 horror comedy film.

The Oxford English Dictionary says gremlin originated as Royal Air Force (RAF) slang and was originally used to refer to lowly workers or dogsbodies. An extract from The Aeroplane in 1929 stated: "There is a class abhorred, loather by all the high and mighty, slaves who work but get little [...] They are but a herd of gremlins, Gremlins who do all the flying, Gremlins who do much instructing, work shunned by the wing commanders."

However, less than a decade later pilots started to use gremlins in a different context, referring to imaginary mischievous sprites that created problems in the aircraft. Former pilot Pauline Gowers mentions gremlins in her book Women with Wings in 1938, describing them as:

"weird little creatures who fly about looking for unfortunate pilots who are either lost or in difficulties with the weather [...] They fly about with scissors in each hand to try to cut the wires on an aeroplane."

Fighter pilot turned author Roald Dahl would introduce gremlins to popular culture in 1943 with his first children's book The Gremlins, a story about mischievous creatures who try to sabotage the aircraft of British pilots. Walt Disney took an interest in making a film from the story and even made a range of plush toys and posters but the project was canned because distributors felt the public had grown tired of war films. 

Walt Disney and Roald Dahl with the Gremlin toys for the film that was never made © Disney

Dahl would have greater success with books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and the BFG while Gremlins would wait another 40 years before they hit the big screen but it would be Warner Bros rather than Disney who would reap the rewards.

The origin of the word gremlin is uncertain but there are a number of plausible theories. One theory is that gremlin stems from the Old English word gremian meaning 'to enrage, provoke or irritate' although there isn't a huge amount of evidence to back this up.

A sign advertising Kentish ale and stout by the Fremlin's Brewery.

Another possibility is it a combination of goblin with the name Fremlin as Fremlin's beer, once the largest brewery in Kent, was drunk by pilots around the time the word appeared. An article in the Observer in 1942 reported: 

"the young fliers of the R.A.F [..] invented a whole hierarchy of devils. They called them Gremlins, 'on account of they were goblins which came out of Fremlin beer bottles'. They were the genii loci of the R.A.F messes in India and the Middle East, where Fremlin's beer bottles were plentiful."

A interesting fact that may support this claim, is that the Fremlin's Brewery had a tradition to leave out dishes of beer for an unseen mythical sprite called Hodfellow who would wreak havoc in the brewery if nothing was left out for him. It's not inconceivable that this story made its way to the pilots and inspired the term gremlin but it seems that too many Fremlins were drunk for anyone to truly remember.