It is. In Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner he talks about his early fascination with the word tendrils. Says he picked it up from TS Eliot and never bothered to look up the meaning. Being a DUmmie aficionado, after a year or two of reading the work, I did look up its meaning.
From Wikipedia:
A meme (pronounced /miːm/) is any thought or behavior that can be passed from one person to another by means of imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus.
The word "meme" is a neologism coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins occuring in 'The Selfish Gene' to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious belief, clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches).
Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (similarly to Darwinian biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. "Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts."
Here's my definition of a neologism:
When an old word won't do, or you're too lazy to find an old word that will do, or you're just too damn important to be bothered with an old word, just make one up.
Sometimes there isn't an old word. Sometimes a writer comes along who really is clever and makes up a good new word. Shakespeare was such a writer; Joyce was such a writer. Hey, Dawkins, you're not Shakespeare, you're no Joyce. You aren't even a Darwin.
You made up the word because it sounded like "gene?" Dawkins, go home and get your shine box.
“A man’s memes are his portals of discovery.”