For a long time I’ve been mildly fascinated by what I would call the meme title. I’m not entirely sold on the scientific value of the “meme” as a concept, but it does have heuristic legs. As I understand it, the meme is roughly the cultural equivalent of the gene, that is, a kind of minimal unit that replicates itself, with variations, throughout communities and across time. It is often described as a kind of virus, something you almost can’t help catching if you are exposed to it enough, whether it is picking up an accent (doing a bad British accent, despite yourself, after just one Hugh Grant movie) or adopting a particular phrase (“flip-flop”). (Not all memes are linguistic of course).

By “meme title” I mean a title that provides a template for other titles that often suddenly appear in waves. The first example that comes to mind is Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). The movie, which I liked considerably less than most of the rest of the espresso-drinking world did, played an historically important role in launching the independent film movement, but in absolute terms the number of people who saw it (it grossed a little under $25 million in the U.S. according to the Internet Movie Database; there are literally hundreds of movies that made over $100 million) doesn’t begin to explain the extent to which the title’s formula has permeated popular writing. It’s hard to get through the Sunday New York Times without seeing a permutation of it.

A popular one in academic circles –and apparently in the blogosphere—is Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. This is a good example of how the formula can come almost to own the word. A Google search for “discontents” reveals, among the first three pages, only a few uses that aren’t part of the formula. Whatever it might be, it has its discontents: globalization, Ikeaphobia, virtuality, idealism, innovation, the new gilded age, time, secularism, marriage, videogaming, g-mail . . . Try it, it’s easy.

“Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” has had a good run recently; a few years ago lots of things were “reloaded.” This is an interesting instance of how minimal a citation can be, given certain constraints. Matrix Reloaded was an omnipresent cultural phenomenon, but it could be used as a template only because “reloaded” is not that common of an adjective, especially when placed after the noun, so syntax matters too. By contrast, “fuzzy math” –not originally a title of course, but it served as a template for many—had a more restricted range of use. In general it is probably easier to produce successful variations when the original is long because the variation itself needs to recall the original as its context. One-word variations are possible, but usually only with a little help, like a review of Troy, accompanied by a picture of Brad Pitt in sandals, with the headline Oi! Puns are an obvious way to create variation, but not the only one. Sex, Spies, and Videotape is a qualitatively different rhetorical move than Sex, Lies, and MP3s. (Roman Jakobson's “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” seems helpful here).

I once knew a group of people who as a party game would come up with the porn titles for existing movies, some just silly, some gross. (I remember one person reporting The Sperminator as an actual title). This game is probably an ancestor of my current game of inventing fake academic book and panel titles (“Everybody Loves Raymond Williams” is still my favorite). As with the porn-title game, the fun is not at the expense of Raymond Williams (or the Terminator), but at the facility of the little culture factories that churn out so many “clever” titles, but I have to admit that at a certain point the fake ones and the good ones become hard to distinguish. This must be what it feels like to work in marketing.

I still haven’t come up with a satisfactory explanation for why some titles become paradigmatic and others don’t. The popularity or importance of the title has to cross a certain threshold, but that alone is not enough to explain why certain formulas become generative. It seems to be a confluence of multiple factors: mass circulation and meeting certain linguistic constraints, for starters. The virus also has a temporal dimension, an expiration date, though canned goods can last a surprisingly long time.

In any case, the meme title works --or at least gets work-- because it blends familiarity and novelty in an economical way. It is a miniature linguistic simulacrum of consumer logic. It is striking that, porn aside, the main areas of cultural production in which this form of title-generation proliferates are entertainment reporting and academia, especially the Humanities, realms in which titles need to “break through the clutter,” as they say in advertising. This is a clear but not entirely lamentable sign of the extent to which Humanities publishing is caught up in market logic. Word people have enjoyed punning and allusion for a long time of course, but surely the significance of rhetorical structures changes over time. Whatever else they do, today meme and variation make it easier to judge a book by its cover.