A Gilded Planet

There once were three bald writers. Their keyboards were as worn as their heads were shiny. The three bald writers were named John, Max and Nick. John and Max each wrote blogs. They wrote other things too, but mainly blogs. They would both dispute this characterization, but I am just going to stick with my interpretation in this exercise for just a moment if you'll indulge me. Nick once wrote a column for The Believer that really felt like a blog even though it wasn't. For some reason, a collection of Nick's columns entitled The Polysyllabic Spree felt most especially like a blog, even though it came in book form. Maybe it's because he began each column with a list of books he had read along with a list of books he had bought during that month. Or maybe not. Max and Nick each wrote novels. John rarely ventured into the world of prose except for a few short stories. John wrote screenplays, but Max and Nick also wrote screenplays, though not nearly as many as John, ...

A reader and friend writes in to tell me that the OED traces 'immersive' from as far back as the seventeenth century, or much earlier than I acknowledged in the previous post . Clearly the OED's SEO needs improvement, Merriam Webster is fucked, and I need to be a bit more thorough in my researches.

Update: I'm an idiot. 'Immersive' is not a word according to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Wait. I know what you're thinking: but then how do I describe my experience with Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ? How do I do that, huh? Luckily, less reputable online dictionaries do define 'immersive' as a word in the following way: noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one's senses and may create an altered mental state For some reason, I find it very surprising that it took digital technology to motivate us to come up with the word 'immersive.' Did earlier generations not imagine novels or movies to be immersive experiences? Is there another word out there that I'm forgetting which does the same work as 'immersive'? I would like to know this synonym.  

Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in the 1970s to describe the unit in cultural evolution that corresponds to the "gene" familiar in biological evolution. For Dawkins, a meme referred to both ideas and the physical, behavioral and social manifestations of ideas. Like genes, memes replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. This happens through various forms of cultural transmission: writing, speech, gesture, music, image - pretty much anything imitable or reproducible. In recent years, the term "meme" has entered common parlance with a different meaning than that designated by Dawkins and his academic colleagues and acolytes. The new meaning is related yet distinct from that used first in the 1970s. The phrase "internet meme" generally refers to a new breed of inside joke that spreads via the Internet. The most recognizable example is a funny image accompanied by a pithy caption rendered in a bulbous font. I am going to suggest...

H/T to Cup of Joe for inspiring this post.

Is "abstract" or "concrete" more appropriate to describe the result of quantifying the intangible?