Recently new words have come into general usage. I can't quite figure ou what they are supposed to mean. 'woke' - seems to have political overtones...
That was the original idea.Meme is from 1976 - before the internet. It was Dawkins that coined it in his book The Selfish Gene. The word and the concept is a play on 'gene'
A meme is an idea that is advantageously fit for survival; it reproduces and prospers much like a virus.
Again, the term "woke" has probably evolved from its initial meaning at this point. "Woke", these days, is more of an ideological position than simple awareness and care about injustice. "Woke" is increasingly being used as an excuse to limit free speech, unfortunately. But that's a whole other can of worms.'Woke' simply means culturally and ethically alert to injustice.
I'm not sure that's true. While most won't recognise the "photo/caption" technically as an "image macro", I would think most still recognise that a meme needs to have gone viral, for example. Without that spread into people's consciousness, there is no meme, just a photo/caption, and I think the majority still understand that.Unfortunately, majority usage these days seems to use the word to refer to photos with supposedly funny captions plastered across them and posted on the internet. The more general meaning seems to be disappearing.