Words

• Surgent:

a rising; swelling, as a flood.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

• Surgency:

is a personality attribute that is part of the Big Five personality traits, or the Five-factor model (FFM). It is most commonly referred to as the quality of extraversion. Other synonyms for surgency include dominance, self-confidence, competitiveness, outgoingness, and decisiveness. Surgency involves patterns of behaviour often exhibited in group settings and generally concerned with getting ahead in life. Such behavioural patterns often appear when someone is trying to influence or control others. Individuals lower in surgency prefer to work by themselves and have relatively little interest in influencing, controlling, or competing with others.

The word does not appear in standard dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster’s and Cambridge; thus it appears to be coined by Tupes and Christal or some earlier researcher.

• Meme:

consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or 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.