Baseball announced its annual awards this week, and National League MVP Bryce Harper gave a slew of interviews.
During one interview he stumbled upon a question (in essence, "Want to be bald or never hit homeruns?"), and Harper answered the following (0:25 for the "meh-mehs"):
In trying to avoid becoming a meh-meh, with his flub Harper is probably well onto becoming a meh-meh.
The word that's tripping him up--and, admittedly, many people, let's face it--is "meme," pronounced "meem."
To Harper's defense, the word is barely older than he is, having been created in 1976 by evolutionary biologist and famed atheist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. There's an unspoken rule that academic papers or books of any heft require the creation of some phrase or word as the backbone of its argument--or academics turn their collective nose up. Dawkins created meme--from the ancient Greek word mimeme, which means an "imitated thing," to explain the evolutionary principle how culture transmits and evolves--a "self-replicating unit." Meme aligns itself with the similar gene, in both theory and pronouncement.
Nowadays, the word has been revitalized because of the internet. Internet memes occur everyday, replicating on levels Dawkins could never have imagined 39 years ago. And because Harper tried to avoid becoming an internet meh-meh, the internet memes have already begun:
Going back to the original question that caused this whole problem for Harper in the first place: He does have one hell of a head of hair.
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