A Study Of "X-哥" In Terms Of Memetics

Recent years have witnessed the birth and rapid transmission of increasing largenumber of popular words on the network, such as “X-门”,“山寨”(shanzhai) and “给力”(gelivable). And the meaning of these new popular words has diverged from the originalmeaning. In2010, the rapid spread of “犀利哥”(Brother Sharp) on the Internet hasaroused people’s attention and given rise to the emergence of different kinds of “X-哥”.Meanwhile, the meaning of “哥” has also diverged from its original meaning to a certaindegree.At present, the domestic studies of “X-哥” are mainly from the perspectives ofsociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, semantics and so on. And these studies are mainlyabout the reasons of the popularity of “X-哥” and the meaning explanations of certain “X-哥”. Few studies have given a systematic analysis of “X-哥” on the basis of corpus.Therefore, this thesis studies the features of “X-哥” from memetic perspective on the basisof previous researches and corpus to testify whether “X-哥” can be a strong meme or not.The study of “X-哥” can present a general picture of its evolution process and predict itsstatus in dictionary edition. Meanwhile, the research methodology employed in this thesiscan also serve as a reference for the studies of other popular new-coined words.Memetics, based on Darwin’s evolution theory, is a new theory to interpret culturalevolution. According to Memetics, successful memes have the following three features:longevity, fecundity and copy-fidelity. This thesis uses the text analysis research method, itfirstly collects a large number of “X-哥” from two giant search engines: Baidu and Google,then makes the classification of the corpus based on different criteria, and finally analyzesthe features of “X-哥” from three features of strong memes. Through consulting someauthorative dictionaries, it is found out that, so far, no dictionary has mentioned about “X-哥”, so “X-哥” has low longevity; through the analysis of the total productivity and combining force of “X-哥”, it can be seen that “X-哥” is very productive in number, andthe “X” in “X-哥” can be words of different lexical categories, and words of differentsyllable structures, thus “X-哥” enjoys a high fecundity; by analyzing “X-哥” from therespects of age, genetic connection, gender, intimacy and respect, it is found out that “X-哥” is only faithful to the original information pattern in the respect of gender, therefore,“X-哥” has low copy-fidelity. According to memetics, only those memes who have highperformance value in all these three aspects are possible to become successful memes.Thus, contrary to the present opinions, this article concludes that “X-哥” is very unlikelyto become a successful meme.