plaque

A nice plaque for Mickey at the Hall of Fame

I saw this Tweet by comedian Jim Gaffigan,

and it got me wondering
in the way that usually generates ideas for posts on this blog.

 PLAQUE - that gunk on teeth and also those things we win and never know what to do with - (and not to be confused with the disease "plague" - an unfortunate misspelling I often saw with my students) is an odd word for its two very diverse meanings.

Dental plaque is a biofilm of bacteria that grows on surfaces within the mouth. It is sticky and colorless at first, but later it forms tartar and is an even grosser brown or pale yellow. It gets all over teeth and when it gets along or below the gumline, you have bigger problems.

A commemorative plaque is certainly nicer than that stuff on your teeth. You can stick it to a wall, although if you get a lot of them, you can stick them in a drawer.

What's the connection? Even Wikipedia didn't try to answer that for either plaque. But some etymological digging told me that the word in those uses comes from mid-19th century from French, where it arrived via the Dutch noun plak meaning "tablet" which in turn came from the Dutch verb plakken meaning "to stick."

I guess the dental gunk refers to the verb and the way it sticks to your teeth, while the award is a tablet (though you do stick it on a wall or in a drawer).

I tried, but failed, to find a plaque that commemorates plaque, but it probably wouldn't cost much to have one made. You might want to give it to your dental hygienist next time you get a good cleaning.

The dental variety

Meme

A meme (AKA Internet meme) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Nowadays, these tend to spread via the Internet and particularly through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

Memes are seen as cultural analogues to genes because they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to outside forces.

The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme from Ancient Greek meaning "imitated thing." It was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene well before the Internet. Dawkins gives examples of memes from catchphrases, fashion, and technology.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance.

Memes that propagate less prolifically become extinct. Others survive, spread, and sometimes evolve or mutate.

Memes existed before we had that word to attach to them. I wrote here earlier about the phrase "Kilroy was here" which was a popular, viral meme that appeared during and after World War II.

Looking at memes popular in the online culture in 2106, we find a lot of lightweight items.

As Andy Warhol predicted about the more and more frequent "15 minutes of fame" we would see in culture, someone such as Ken Bone became a meme very briefly during the second Clinton/Trump Presidential Debate.  Bone, an undecided voter tapped by Gallup, asked the candidates an earnest, straightforward question about energy policy and quickly became a meme more due to his old-fashioned look and a red sweater that sold out within a matter of hours and became a popular Halloween costume.

“Me at the beginning of 2016 vs me at the end of 2016” was popular photo meme in 2016. But, unfortunately, what Dawkins meant as a serious kind of cultural evolution seems to indicate that our evolution is a mimetic devolution into triviality and pop fluff.

Yule

A Yuletide bonfire of Yule logs - via Flickr CC

Yule or Yuletide ("Yule time") is a festival observed by the historical Germanic peoples, later undergoing Christianised reformulation resulting in the now better-known Christmastide. Scholars have connected the celebration to the Wild Hunt, the god Odin and the pagan Anglo-Saxon Mōdraniht.

Yule is the modern English representation of the Old English words ġéol or ġéohol  which was the 12-day festival of "Yule" which was later called "Christmastide." The words ġéola or ġéoli  referred to the month of "Yule." To further complicate things, ǽrra ġéola referred to the period before the Yule festival (December) and æftera ġéola referred to the period after Yule (January).

The noun Yuletide is first appears around 1475 in the explicitly pre-Christian context primarily in Old Norse. The the long-bearded Norse god Odin also had the names jólfaðr (Old Norse for "Yule father") and jólnir ("the Yule one").

Today Yule is also used to a lesser extent in English-speaking as a synonym for Christmas. Present day Christmas customs such as the Yule log, Yule goat, Yule boar, Yule singing, and others stem from pagan Yule.

• More about the Yule celebrations
• Yule: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Winter Solstice
• Yule: A Celebration of Light and Warmth