Time went by and I wrote some docs about the project, including 'War Story' (above) in which I casually note that "I invented a horrible new jargon-word: Memes", among other trivia of the project history.
In ensuing years I and my colleagues became accustomed to our Memes Database and it passed into institutional jargon among us: "You have to edit Memes for that to work," or "is that in Memes yet?" were common turns of phrase. It was part of the in-group vocabulary that every small, long-lived work group develops over years of collaboration. I did notice after a few years that that the m-word was popping up in totally unrelated places -- in the 'culture-jam' polemics of Kalle Lasn, or in science fiction. Gradually it got to be almost a commonplace word, though with a meaning rather different from our in-house usage.
In the summer of 2003 I received some rather terse emails from a grad student with a communications degree, who asked about the Memes database and how the word came to be used for the project -- did it have anything to do with 'memetics'? After a quick google for 'memetics', I told him what I vaguely remembered. He then pressed the issue of my claim (in 'War Story', above) to have invented the word 'meme'.
This struck me as rather odd -- I wondered if some litigious idiot was trying to copyright yet another bit of the language. In the midst of a marathon debug session I also had little time or patience for historical inquiries. But his curt, almost accusatory tone puzzled me. What was this guy's issue with an obscure word that we used for an obscure project in astronomy software support? We'd had our share of C&D threats from intelprop lawyers and this sounded irritatingly familiar (3M once threatened one of our grads with all kinds of mayhem if he didn't rename one subroutine in a mid-size astro data reduction package -- it was called 'postit'.)
However I was also getting curious: it was hardly relevant to our work here, but where did the darned word come from? I was pretty sure I remembered abbreviating "sememe", but a lot of years and code have gone by since 1996. Memory is notoriously plastic. And where did the new popular usage of 'meme' come from in the last 3 or 4 years? It surely hadn't leaked out of our little backwater of Big Science.
Google and ye shall find. Searching for "meme invent word" I was both horrified and amused to find solid documentation that Richard Dawkins (he of Blind Watchmaker fame) had invented the word 'meme' as 'a unit of cultural information' -- in 1976! Talk about prior art. And talk about embarrassment. Though I don't recall ever reading The Selfish Gene, the book in which he developed this new vocabulary, obviously I must have been exposed to Dawkins' work as an undergrad -- via a paper or essay or review . . . and 20 years later, the word 'meme' "just sounded right" to me as the label for a unit of meaning. No wonder!
The only saving grace in this particular instance of Making a Fool of Oneself in Public is that Dawkins' reputation and prominence are such that no one could seriously imagine any non-famous private person deliberately contesting his authorship of anything. It would be like contesting authorship of the phrase "a brief history of time"! The embarrassment of displaying one's cultural illiteracy in public is a mite painful, but at least my bogus claim to have invented the word 'meme' is wholly absurd, as opposed to genuine dirty tricks and idea-thieving which occasionally blight academia.
What's particularly funny is that my ignorance persisted right up to the moment of googling (that is, until I saw that first hit and almost fell out of my chair). Admittedly I think my inquisitive correspondent was winding me up, deliberately trying to see how far my ignorance went (or perhaps my megalomania!) by not giving me any clue as to the reason for his persistent questions. But his reticence did enhance the punch line :-)
I also find it amusing that the word 'meme' appears to have done exactly what memes (in the popular sense, not in the context of our database) are supposed to do: leak out into the public consciousness and settle in so firmly that they seem to have always been there, or even (ahem) to have sprung up in one's own mind. I wonder if all the people who tell FOAF stories are conscious of repeating a stock folk-story, or if they have come (by meme osmosis?) to believe that the tale of the Vanishing Hitch-Hiker really did happen to their boss' second cousin from Newark.
Anyway, as of this year of very little grace 2003, I do formally declare to all readers of the Memes War Story (all 270 of them in 6 years or so) and for the especial benefit of those who have been under the same rock I've apprently been under for the last 20 years, that I am not the originator of the word 'meme' -- which predates our little project by two decades. I also feel that I owe Dr Dawkins an apology -- first for ignoring his earlier work, and then for blithely adopting it as my own! In academic circles plagiarism is a dreadful offence and I'm embarrassed to have given the appearance of it, no matter how ridiculous the context.
One of the most wonderful things about http and the Web it has created, is that millions of proofreaders are surfing millions of pages every day, and some take the time to send corrections and wake-up calls to the page author. Another wonderful (and worrisome) thing about it is that we can correct and expand and revise our documents, be they ever so old -- and not suffer the humiliation of an embarrassing error in 5000 copies of a paper journal that will never be revised. Hooray for nosy readers, and hooray for a medium that so easily accommodates errata and retractions.