{"id":11477,"date":"2008-09-22T22:25:39","date_gmt":"2008-09-23T05:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/09\/22\/11477.html"},"modified":"2008-09-22T22:25:39","modified_gmt":"2008-09-23T05:25:39","slug":"19thcentury-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/09\/22\/19thcentury-meme\/","title":{"rendered":"19th-century meme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You know those questionnaires that get circulated through the blogosphere, a list of questions (about likes and dislikes and such) that you're supposed to answer and then pass along to others?<\/p>\n

Turns out the idea's been around a lot longer than I thought:<\/p>\n

\n

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he discovered a questionnaire in an English-language album belonging to his friend Antoinette[...], entitled \"An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.\" At that time, it was a fad among wealthy English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the taker.<\/p>\n

--Wikipedia article on Proust Questionnaire<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I should note that the article is entirely unsourced, so I have no idea whether that line about it having been a fad is true or not.<\/p>\n

Apparently Vanity Fair<\/cite> regularly runs celebrity answers to a similar questionnaire, and the TV show Inside the Actors Studio<\/cite> asks guests an allegedly related but entirely different set of questions.<\/p>\n

Still, I'm intrigued by the idea that a hundred and some years ago, relatively ordinary people were passing around this kind of questionnaire, and now it's happening again online. Is it a continuous tradition? Have people been doing this all along, on paper and in email and such? Or is it a revival? And how far back does the idea go? Did Jane Austen write up her meme answers and send them to friends? Did Shakespeare?<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know those questionnaires that get circulated through the blogosphere, a list of questions (about likes and dislikes and such)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}