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September 24, 2003
Birth of a meme
A mailing list I'm on currently began a small discussion on the history of Murphy's Law, it's birth, original meaning, and rise to popularity. One of the members noted that Oxford English dictionary keeps a record of the earliest mention of such phrases, and can point it back to 1955, suggesting that everything in this article is actually kept to date. Oddly enough the article also (makes small indirect) mentions of this later on.
All of this began with someone posting a link to a piece of this article, which mentions the book Murphy's Law And Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong published in 1977 that sparked the authors original interest. The article itself is a completely fascinating read on the history of a phrase so commonly used today. A personal favorite part of mine is the General Yeager quote about the Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation.
The timing of this article falls inline almost perfectly with Richard Dawkins recent article on wired.com about the birth of a new meme: bright. It seems someone has decided that the word bright should no longer represent what has traditionally been associated with it, but rather to represent those people in life whom do not follow a religion. I am not entirely sure I agree with this change in term, nor do I even see how this connotation will become popular. In the case of Murphy's Law, it became instantly recognizable to most engineers, had a humorous note to it, and began to penetrate the psyche. I don't see bright making it much past the world of academia. If you were to ask any college student about life, you'd come to realize that academia isn't associated with the world beyond the academic walls. I guess this is my chance to watch and see if/how a meme will expand into the thought-space of everyone else.
Posted by Dan at September 24, 2003 01:41 PM