Tag: memes

Was Pumped to Find This One

I’ve seen a few Jesus memes down through the years. Came across this one this week, which was brand new to me. Filled me with holy laughter.

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the whey, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.

Isaiah 30:21

Stick with Gold Standard. This is the whey.

Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the whey of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John.

Acts 18:24-25

Undoubtedly Apollos was also quite buff.

And asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Whey, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Acts 9:2

Paul had absolutely no hope of bringing those men and women in bound.

But when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the Whey before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus.

Acts 19:9

Paul left those puny naysayers to their own devices.

About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Whey.

Acts 19:23

Demetrius, a silversmith in Ephesus, was insanely jealous of the gains being made by the apostles, and thus stirred up a riot against them.

Commit your whey to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.

Psalm 37:5

The Lord is my strength and my shield.

They were all trying to frighten us, thinking, “Their hands will get too weak for the work, and it will not be completed.”

But I prayed, “Now strengthen my hands.”

Nehemiah 6:9

Didn’t change that one.

Lord, hear my prayer.

World Changing Word Coinage

Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

What is the best way to make a difference in the world?

[. . . ]

I’d like to posit that creating an idea that colonizes our minds—a signpost in the memescape, if you will—is a very high leverage way of making a difference in the world. . .The kind of signposts I’m thinking about are often little more than short phrases—or even single word neologisms—that, due to what ideas they have compressed within them, reorient how you see specific spheres of experience.

These are “catchy” concepts that often combine two or more words in unexpected ways, creating a mental hook for a vague penumbra of facts and experiences. And these signposts evoke a similar sensation to when you learn a new word: once you’ve been exposed to one of these, you see it everywhere. . .

How to begin? Recognize patterns in the world and name them. Smash unexpected terms together and see if they sing. Realize when you are struggling to describe something and spend some time just sitting and figuring out how to compress that description down into a short pithy phrase.

Samuel Arbesman, “Constructing Signposts in the Memescape“

There’s something to this idea, but the change you render could be for good or ill. Shifting the memescape is reckless idea, I think, adding distraction to distraction, piling sound byte upon sound byte, pasting clutter over clutter, and hoping that the new coinage will effect a mystical transformational outcome. Arbesman names “premium mediocre,” “cozy futurism,” “horsehistory,” “intuition pump,” “undiscovered public knowledge,” “Matthew effect,” and several others as examples of signposts we now “see everywhere.”

He must be reading and conversing with people quite different than those in my sphere. I have not encountered a single example he cites.

I’m more an advocate of developing discourses, but, as someone who has been attempting to communicate the Christian tradition to people for years, I know how valuable shorthand can be, as can fresh ways of expressing old ideas in memorable, pithy ways. Preachers are often meme generators. The best build a world around those memes.