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.
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' etymology_text supplied in this packet (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:467131129)
Two branches
會自我複製的文化單位
這一層就是核心畫面本身，還沒有被縮小到網路上。
noun · C1
An idea, a habit, or a way of doing something that copies itself from person to person through a group, in the way a gene is passed from parent to child. Used when talking about how culture spreads.
迷因（文化複製單位）
網路上被複製、被改的內容
把核心畫面縮到一個地方：網路。複製變得又快又便宜，於是能被看見、被指著說「就是這個」。
noun · B1
A picture, video, or joke that spreads fast on the internet because people copy it, change a small part, and post their own version. It can mean the shared pattern or one single post of that kind.
迷因／梗圖