Graffiti have been the elemental memes of political speech, from the walls of Pompeii to the New York subways to the Berlin Wall, in all the oppressed countries of this world. Ariana Grande just unveiled the official artwork for her upcoming album, Thank, U Next, but after a little Photoshop-brainstorming session on Sunday, fans may inspire her to consider some new options. Over the weekend … some Arianators started meme-ing the cover of Ari's fifth album with various pics of the "7 Rings" singer… We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that 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'. you want can be used if you first install it on your device and then type in the font name on Imgflip. Variations on the meme were posted to the comments section of @SeriousUnci's post over the course of the following days (examples shown below).

But as all this meme use was going on, a new use was bubbling up—the one that in more recent years has become the dominant one. The first instance of this use that we were able to find in the Nexis database of thousands of mostly news publications is a 1998 interview on CNN:Once the meme is out there, it's very hard to quash. No amount of evidence will stop a certain segment of the public from believing … These days meme is evolving semantically again, which seems like an appropriately meme-y thing to do. We've spotted it functioning as a verb: Memes are, simply put, ideas that catch on. This book is, not so simply, a collection of memes in essay form …, written by self-proclaimed off-planet journalist Rheingold.

JANELLE BROWN, WIRED NEWS: And the next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it's become a net meme. Claude I. Salem, The New York Times Magazine, 17 Apr. 2011 The Internet and a New Meaning of 'Meme' sunglasses, speech bubbles, and more. Opacity and resizing are supported, and you can copy/paste imagesOf course, these are memes (sense 1) that have yet to catch on—but we'll be watching to see if they do. The new sense of meme made its Merriam-Webster debut in 2015, defined in full as "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media." The Evolving Use of 'Meme' This dictionary defines Dawkins' sense of meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." The word wasn't entered until 1998, when it earned a spot in an update of the Tenth Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Although Dawkins had coined the word in a 1976 book, it was more than 20 years before the accumulation of examples of the word in use demonstrated that it was a fully established term in the language. Here's the kind of evidence that paved the way for the word's dictionary debut:

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. The particular meme discussed in the interview is believed my many to be the first meme, in the modern sense of the word. But it's interesting to note that, as with most other instances of the word in use for years to come, the example was seen as simply an iteration of the existing meaning. GREG LEFERVE, CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who is this tyke, slashing his air guitar, dancing the boogaloo (ph) and haunting "Ally McBeal?" He's a figment of Michael Girard's imagination. It's a free online image maker that lets you add custom resizable text, images, and much more to templates.user-uploaded templates using the search input, or hit "Upload new template" to upload your own template Imgflip supports all fonts installed on your device including the default Windows, Mac, and web fonts, LEFERVE: Girard created the baby to show off his animation software. It worked. Now, zillions of the copies of the diapered dancer animate computer screens across the Internet. Yes! Animated meme templates will show up when you search in the Meme Generator above (try "party parrot").

Meme isn't new: it dates to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where it functioned with a meaning other than its current most common one. In Dawkins' conception of the term, it is "a unit of cultural transmission"—the cultural equivalent of a gene: A decade into the future, and hiphop has thrown its code indiscriminately into the meme pool—it is immanent, endemic, ubiquitous. However, you can also upload your own templates or start from scratch with empty templates. How to make a memefrom your device or from a url. For designing from scratch, try searching "empty" or "blank" templates. including bold and italic. Over 1,300 free fonts are also supported for all devices. Any other font