Calquer

I’m interested in the Tetris effect, and ear worms – these are things that stick in your head and have obvious relations to memetics. I’m sure they are caused by hijacking our neuro-anatomy, but that is for another time.

This post is about something else which the ear worm page linked to: calque – that’s a new one on me.

Used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language.

“Calque” itself is a loanword from the French noun calque (“tracing; imitation; close copy”); the verb calquer means “to trace; to copy, to imitate closely”; papier calque is “tracing paper“.^[1] The word “loanword” is itself a calque of the German word Lehnwort, just as “loan translation” is a calque of Lehnübersetzung.^[2]

The word “earworm” is an example of a calque borrowed from the German “Ohrwurm”. In evolution and in memetics, we have adopted terms like replicate, duplicate, copy, imitate and so on. But we know that evolution proceeds through descent with modification and the differential fitness of an exponential population in an environment with limited carrying capacity: “survival of the fittest”, as it is often misunderstood. We have a word for copy but do not have a dedicated biological term to indicate imperfect fidelity, and get around this with “near duplicate” or “almost exact” or “copying error”. It seems to me that this loan word fits perfectly with the principle of replicators in that the process is almost, but not exact, copying.

While copying is erroneous, there can also be taken as inerrant. Replication is prone to errors, and that is what drives adaptation and speciation. A word like calque, perhaps “calking” might be a better way of talking about the process of genetic and memetic copying, as this emphasises the point that these entities do make copies, but those copies might be slightly different. It might sound odd at first exposure, but to say ‘the meme calked across the web’, or ‘the message calked though a series of Chinese whispers’ intones memetic drift through retelling.