I really dislike the misuse of the word “meme.”

A meme is an intentionally emulated behavior. On the Internet, that means communicating by way of a previously established form of media or quotation. Rickrolling was a meme, planking was a meme, many of the image macros in /r/AdviceAnimals are memetic, and so on.

Most of what people refer to as “memes” are just… well, literally anything, it seems. Twitter screenshots get mistakenly called by the name, as do text-based stories. People seem to have decided that the word “meme” just means “something I saw online.”

Don’t give me that guff about language evolving, either. People used to conflate schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder all the time, but the popular misuse of the word didn’t make those folks any less wrong. The word “meme” refers to a specific phenomenon, and I’m bloody sick of it being used in places where it doesn’t apply.

TL;DR: “Memes” are not “things you saw on the Internet.”