Today’s Lingo Overload Example is a lushly lingo-laden meme paper:
“The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976–1999,” Jeremy Trevelyan Burman [pictured here], Perspectives on Science, Spring 2012, Vol. 20, No. 1, Pages 75-104. The author is at York University. The publisher says: “Burman was named an ‘international emerging scholar’ by the Jacobs Foundation and the Jean Piaget Society.” The abstract contains the following passage, which may be best appreciated if you read it aloud in a crowded room:
“The meme became a virus of the mind. (In the UK, this occurred slightly later.) It is also now clear that this becoming involved complex sustained interactions between scholars, journalists, and the letter-writing public. We must therefore read the ‘meme’ through lenses provided by its popularization. The results are in turn suggestive of the processes of meaning-construction in scholarly communication more generally.”
(HT Danielle Venton)