Meme is an old word, though it’s recently been applied to the Internet pop culture. Specifically, a meme today is an Internet theme, a picture, or saying, or something that gets beaten into our everyday digital life.

The most important thing about the word meme is knowing how to pronounce it. High tech words go hand-in-hand with being cool, so there’s no point even uttering the word before you affirm its proper pronunciation.

Say meem for meme.

The Internet culture memes are vast and shallow. Anyone who populates Facebook has seen a few memes from time to time. Most of them are pictures, images of cats and people and such, which have evolved to the point where they become instantly recognizable.

Common visual memes can be found on the website knowyourmeme.com. Specifically, click here to see some of the popular visual memes.

Some of my favorite memes are:

Those are only some of my favorites, and you don’t see the entire list. I could post them all day, but other web sites handle that task deftly.

New memes pop up all the time. I use my teenage sons to stay clued into the most common ones. They’ll be sitting around and suddenly start reciting things I’ve never heard of. Then they say, “Dad! It’s the latest meme! Haven’t you seen it?”

Of course not. I’m old.

So while it’s handy to know the word meme, I fully understand that someday soon it will probably be replaced by another, equally interesting and descriptive word. That’s probably a meme in itself, or is destined soon to become one.