Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA18571 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 20 May 2000 11:32:30 +0100 From: Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> Organization: Reborn Technology To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Guru mutation Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 11:06:08 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <004501bfc214$824297c0$03000004@r2z3h3> Message-Id: <00052011274301.00329@faichney> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Sat, 20 May 2000, Tyger wrote:
>Hello Bill,
>
>Recently, I have been shown the memetic mutation of the term Guru, which
>originally meant a spiritual mentor (from Hindou/Sanscrit). Nowadays the
>term Guru has become a synonym for expertise, professionalism, leadership,
>avant-guarde geekness and the like, especially in the high-tech environment.
>I wonder, how did it loose its Spirituality and gained its techno-savy
>meaning. Any idea how this mutation came about? The spread of this meme is
>quite astonishing, and could be one to follow for research into meme
>mutations. As I guess wildly that the term Guru was applied somewhere in the
>past to certain unix users as a joke and intended as a pun. The jargon club
>of the net outmatched itself in this word, no doubt.
I can remember when the word became quite widely known in the West in its
original sense. In about 1968 the Beatles drastically raised the public
profile of the Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental
Meditation movement. Other similar events in the late 60s and early 70s
made "Guru" quite common currency, and it was often used jokingly, as you
suggest. I think Unix was one of the first contexts in which its use had
no spiritual significance whatsoever. The timing would be about right,
as Unix got going in the mid-70s. And it would seem to have spread out
from there, like other comp sci originated memes such as putting capitals
in the middle of compound words like MicroSoft, which started I think
in the Pascal programming language. That's certainly where I first came
across it, in the mid-80's. In C, mainly used on Unix, words were run
together, but virtually no upper-case was used then -- there's more of it
now, especially in C++. There has been a C-like thing for all lower-case
outside computing, but the internal capitalisation meme seems much stronger
and these are obviously alleles.
BTW, if memetics is to be internally consistent, then whether a change in
a meme is accidental or deliberate is irrelevant -- from the meme's point
of view, which is what memetics is about if it's about anything, it makes
no difference. It's a mutation either way.
-- Robin Faichney===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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