In 1918, during his second term as president of the Indian National Congress, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya started popularising a phrase from the Mundaka Upanishad, saying that it should be the motto for all Indians, and for the country itself. The phrase was “Satyameva jayate (Truth alone triumphs)”.

In October 1918, halfway around the world, the newly independent Czechoslovakia adopted as its slogan the phrase “Pravda vítezí”, which means more or less the same thing and is a phrase credited to Jan Hus, a martyred 15th century religious reformer and a key figure in Czech history.

In 1918, during his second term as president of the Indian National Congress, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya started popularising a phrase from the Mundaka Upanishad, saying that it should be the motto for all Indians, and for the country itself. The phrase was “Satyameva jayate (Truth alone triumphs)”.

In October 1918, halfway around the world, the newly independent Czechoslovakia adopted as its slogan the phrase “Pravda vítezí”, which means more or less the same thing and is a phrase credited to Jan Hus, a martyred 15th century religious reformer and a key figure in Czech history.

In June this year, a woman named Chelsea Bradford became internet famous when she appeared in a street interview on social media. Responding to a question on what made men go crazy in bed, she said: “Oh, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang”. Within a month, the “Hawk Tuah” girl had launched a line of merchandise, thrown the first pitch at a baseball game, and was charging $30,000 for appearances.

There’s a universe of difference between Malaviya, Hus and Bradford, as there is between Satyameva Jayate and Hawk Tuah, but both are memes — in the original sense of the word.

The word “meme” was coined by the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, as the “cultural equivalent” of the gene.

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrote: “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

Meme spirited

Meanings change over time, and Dawkins’s more serious definition has been overshadowed by online ephemera and epidemics of virality all the way from the dawn of the internet to the present day. Dancing Baby. All Your Base Are Belong To Us (based on a poorly translated phrase in the opening scene of a Japanese videogame). Advice Animals. Lol Cats. Annoying Facebook Girl. Once these were everywhere, and instantly resonant.

Now, the purpose of the meme is changing. In a simple example, I Am Cringe. But I Am Free (usually accompanying an image of a cow staring at the ocean) was considered so confusing, Wknd did an explainer. How did we get here, from the days of the Advice Animals posts of a happy Labrador going “Eat Mushrooms. They Made Mario Grow”?

In many ways, memes are both the graffiti and language of the internet, with in-group versions for subcultures. A programming subgroup may revel in memes about the whimsies of different languages, a gaming subgroup may meme about family trees in Elden Ring, a gardening meme may extol the pleasures of the activity, and Indian investors transpose finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s head onto Liam Neeson’s, changing his famous line from Taken to “I will find you, and I will tax you”.

As these groups grow and bleed into the mainstream, there comes a point when memes make no sense outside their target groups — and sometimes not even there. From the days of a keyboard-playing cat as a dramatic reaction with a musical sting, we have memes whose punchline relies on complicated math, obscure conspiracy theories or an almost-encyclopaedic knowledge of kink.

Rather than aiming to include the average viewer, by offering a quick laugh and a prompt of some sort, these seek — as with so much niche culture — to exclude, and thereby cater more strongly to its small target audience.

Of course, amid the inexplicable, there remain a number of memes with staying power. The Rickroll, where a seemingly serious comment links to the video of the English singer Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, originated in 2007 and is still going strong — though why it should have been that particular song by that particular artist is one of the great mysteries of the internet. Distracted Boyfriend is still popular, seven years on. What makes a meme popular remains elusive; this is a field as vast and capricious as its audience.

But even the most enduring internet memes are ephemeral because they exist purely online. The memes that have lasted are those that became part of the “real world”: ideas such as Satyameva Jayate and Carpe Diem, which originated in the Odes written by the Roman poet Horace more than 2,000 years ago.

The memes we’re really missing — simply because they are so obvious — are the ones in our everyday: stories of Achilles’ heel and Ravana’s navel; the shapes of bridges, homes, offices and skyscrapers; idioms and proverbs; ideas of heaven and hell. Memes are, after all, just ideas that travel well.