The new meaning of the phrase, “going viral”
The phrase “going viral” will probably never evoke the same benign meaning or be used in such an innocent fashion as it was prior to January 2020. One might attribute its evolution into popular vernacular to Richard Dawkins, who coined the word “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, as a concept for evolutionary principles that explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
As the coronavirus courses through our …