The Brights: « How is a meme created? You can sit back and observe the spread of a new fashion, a new slang word, a new way of walking or talking – and let a meme burst onto the scene in its own good time. An example would be the current epidemic of basically, which, as a synonym for er, has infected a ludicrously high proportion of sentences now uttered by English speakers. But the ultimate test in science is experiment: You don’t just wait for something to happen and observe it, you make it happen. » – Wired