As someone who uses words the way a carpenter uses wood, I try to keep abreast of new meanings and new constructions. It is an amusing pastime, often frustrating, and one that could occupy a lot of time in these days of overflowing communications. One of those new words is ‘meme’, coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. A meme is a kind of self-replicating idea or concept, and the modern world is full of them. Those of use who have ever wasted some time on the internet (and that’s all of us) will have stumbled across many examples, from the lolcats to the hashtag.

Memes can be more than just new words, but increasingly it seems that they don’t have to be. If we are to believe statistics, standards of literacy among youngsters are plummeting just as more and more of those youngsters have keyboards thrust in front of them. The result, predictably, is an epidemic of mis-spelling. Think of the monkeys-and-typewriters philosophy, and it becomes clear that among those mis-spellings will be a rich seam of new memes. Equipment is no longer broken, but is ‘borked’. One no longer suffers a failure, but merely a ‘fail’. One who fails by the actions of others is ‘pwned’.

To this list of neologisms and memes, I would like to add ’scrappage’. Initially applied to a government subsidy for the purchase of a new car, through the provision of an inflated trade-in value on an old vehicle, this term has since been applied to all manner of capital purcahses and has even found its way into the laboratory.

I first baulked at the abuse of the word when a leaflet for a replacement window company arrived at home. Not only could I get brand new double glazed units, but for a limited time I could benefit from a scrappage scheme for my old windows. Now, there is zero value in used windows. Instead of scrappage, what was being offering was a discount. Here in the UK, the government has recently introduced a scrappage scheme for old gas boilers. In this case, what it is really offering (as with the original car scheme) is a subsidy.

Among laboratory suppliers, scrappage is the new buzzword. Need a new autoclave? LTE Scientific promises to take away your old model regardless of make, age, or condition, for a minimum discount of GBP500 against a new one. What about a fume cupboard? Opti-Pharma UK is offering a scrappage scheme to further sweeten its deals on modern energy-saving replacements. Both companies have announced these schemes on Laboratorytalk since the beginning of the year.

How long, though, before this neologism takes on full meme status? It is already a new word, defining a new concept. That concept has changed (from subsidy to discount) and the idea has become self-replicating. All that remains is for some ham-fisted teenager to mistype it enough times for an alternative spelling to catch on. Scrapaj, anyone?
This comment was originally published in the Laboratorytalk Newsletter