Picture something that stays alive only by being copied. It has no owner and no plan: one person passes it on, the next person changes a little of it, and the versions that are easy to remember keep going while the rest die out. That is the whole word. The academic sense names the process, the internet sense is that process running at high speed on a screen, and the verbs are what you do when you push a copy along.
From the word’s history
Coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene: mimeme, from Greek mimeomai (to imitate), cut short to look like gene. The word was built to carry the copying picture, which is why every later use still leans on it.
這個字是 1976 年 Richard Dawkins 在《自私的基因》裡造出來的。他把 mimeme 剪短，故意做成跟 gene 一樣的形狀；字根來自希臘文的「模仿」。它一出生就是為了帶著「複製」這個畫面，所以後來的每一層用法都還靠著它。
Wiktionary, "meme"
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。