Wen | Hanqing
White-collar workers in first-tier cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen should more or less hear the following words in their daily exchanges: empowerment, iteration, link, granularity, tipping point, strengthening cognition, breaking through the mind... Yes, these are the "Internet black words" that people often ridicule.
As the name of the word reveals, "Internet black talk" mainly exists in the Internet industry, mainly in large factories. Who coined these words in the first place and how they became popular is now unexamined. But it is certain that they have formed a language ecology in the Internet circle, and there is a trend of overflowing to the advertising circle and the media circle.
A typical "Internet black talk" is like this: "At present, the business has not yet run through a model, after all, the basic business logic has not formed a closed loop, let alone made into an ecology, we are still in the stage of consolidating the foundation, polish our products, and finally form a set of combined punches, in order to effectively empower the ecosystem, reduce the dimension of the blow, and finally feed the entire economy." ”
Found that no, the meaning of the whole paragraph is nothing more than that a business model has not yet been formed, and it is necessary to continue to study and explore. But Internet people use a large paragraph of esoteric words to express this meaning. In terms of efficiency of expression, this is no clearer than a sentence. The sense of difficulty, obscurity, and self-righteousness is precisely where "Internet black talk" has caused more and more people to be dissatisfied and complain.
From the perspective of language evolution, language is fluid and evolving, not rigid and immutable. According to the changes of the times, absorbing new language nutrients, a language can maintain its vitality. Empowerment, precipitation, and mentality, which originated from the Internet or are popular in the Internet circle, may also gradually penetrate into people's social daily life and become part of daily life.
Therefore, "Internet black talk" itself is not a problem, and people are disgusted that these words are full of nonsense and empty content, but they are also sophisticated and self-righteous. Linguist Yespersen gave two criteria for what constitutes a good language. First, the burden of this language memory is relatively light, that is, it is easy to learn and easy to remember; second, good language should be accurate and not ambiguous, that is, this language expresses meaning very accurately. In contrast, the "Internet black talk" is tedious and procrastinating, and it is accustomed to self-extension, which causes a great obstacle to understanding, and is obviously not a "good language".
The most basic function of language is to communicate, so that people can understand and understand. The language education that everyone receives from an early age is also to be concise and easy to understand. Beautiful language will also pursue the rhythm of rhetoric and expression, but they conform to the chinese language rules, and they will not deliberately create words, which is the most fundamental difference between them and "Internet black words".
Internet people use "black words", of course, may also be out of a secret careful thinking: the Internet industry looks decent, gold,high educational content, strong elite attributes, so they are willing to use "Internet black words" to mark their identity to form a distinction with other groups. This kind of psychological vanity, in line with human nature, will make people very useful, but it is illusory and floating, and what this society really appreciates is the kind of pragmatic and capable, low-key and pragmatic quality, innovative and flashy approach, which will not cause everyone's recognition and admiration from the bottom of their hearts.
It should be emphasized that we do not think that language has a high-level and low-level distinction, nor are we willing to put the "Internet black talk" with the hat of "language pollution", I believe that with the washing of time, "Internet black talk" will also complete purification, impractical is eliminated, and the Internet vocabulary that fits people's expression habits and can accurately define new things will remain and become an inseparable part of the Chinese language. We may wish to wait and see the evolution of language. However, for the current internal communication in the Internet industry, we still recommend that practitioners can use more simple and practical language, and less "flower shelves" with high thresholds.
Text: Han Qing
Image: Network
Column moderator: Zhang Yongqun
Editor-in-charge: Wang Yuanfang
Editor: Zhang Yongqun