memes are often creative or humorous and are passed among
friends through e-mails or social media posts.Quark (noun)
An elementary subatomic particle proposed as the fundamental unit
of matter.z Science and technology have always been areas that demand new
words and new uses for old ones. Examples include boson, named
after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose; fermion, named for
Enrico Fermi; and TXDUN, coined by physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
All three of these are types of subatomic particles.z According to 7KH0HUULDP:HEVWHU1HZ%RRNRI:RUG+LVWRULHV,
Gell-Mann was looking for a name for a certain type of hypothetical
subatomic particle. He was used to playing around with such
names as VTXRUN for peculiar objects, and he had come up with the
pronunciation /kwork/ (to rhyme with SRUN), but he had not come
up with a spelling for the word.
ż Then, he came upon the word TXDUN in the following lines
from James Joyce’s classic )LQQHJDQV:DNH: “Three quarks for
Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure
any he has it’s all beside the mark.”ż Gell-Mann wasn’t sure how to pronounce the word, but he said,
³,QDQ\FDVHWKHQXPEHUWKUHH¿WWHGSHUIHFWO\WKHZD\TXDUNV
occur in nature.” He had theorized that quarks could only exist
in threes in making up a proton.ż Gell-Mann wanted to keep Joyce’s spelling of TXDUN, but he
didn’t want to pronounce it as Joyce had probably intended
(/kwark/ to rhyme with ODUN). He decided to keep his original
pronunciation of TXDUN as rhyming with SRUN. Of course, in
general use, many non-physicists pronounce the word the way
it looks: /kwark/.