Rereading Baudolino by Umberto Eco, in William Weaver’s heroic translation. A Byzantine court official has just asked our eponymous protagonist why he’s content to write poems and songs and give them to other people, asking no credit for himself. Baudolino replies, “The fate of a tavern poem is to pass from one mouth to another: it is happiness to hear it sung, and it would be egoism to want to exhibit it only to increase one’s own glory.”

I frequently see people using an image macro to create something funny, and then, if it becomes popular, complaining that people are “stealing their meme”. That never made sense to me, since the original definition of “meme” means something that had become endemic in a population. So it’s good to get such authoritative support for my notion. Caveat: within a paragraph, Baudolino will be accused of being either the Prince of Falsehood or aspiring to be God Almighty.