Author: Mo Jie
If you want to say which word is the most popular this summer, it's yyds. yyds, the initials of "eternal god" in Hanyu Pinyin, first appeared in e-sports circles, and later "broken circles" were used to express high praise. Praise things delicious, yyds; cheer for the strong in the sports world, yyds; captured by good dramas, yyds, look around, almost full of yyds everywhere, there is a "sentence to ten thousand sentences" effect.
Along with yyds, acronyms such as u1s1 (have one say one), awsl (ah I'm dead), xswl (laugh me to death) and other abbreviations are also created by a niche circle of young people, and later appeared widely in the Chinese Internet. For the new wave of popular words, people are not unfamiliar, far away to say that there are BP machine era 886 (bye bye), 520 (I love you), etc., recently said "Xi Da Pu Ben" "I am too difficult" and other residual warmth.
Communication scholar McLuhan has long said that "the media is the message", that is, the nature of the communication tool and the possibilities it brings are far more important than the content of the media, because the former is directly related to our understanding and thinking habits. In the age of social media, a short sentence is broken into several lines, a high dependence on the use of memes, and an increasingly "harsh" response time to messages are becoming the new "norms", which did not appear in the pre-Internet era.
Looking at the continuous change of buzzwords, we can vaguely see the history of the evolution of media technology and people's communication methods. If buzzwords also had the so-called "grammar", they must have perfectly matched the communication tools and technologies of the time, such as digital harmonics in the pager era, alphanumeric emoji (emoji) mixed in the social media era. However, although the "grammar" of different eras is different, it is the same in terms of following the basic principles of linguistic economics. People use word-making methods such as abbreviations in order to achieve faster, more and simpler information transmission with fewer characters.
However, when the vast majority of praise is expressed in terms of "yyds" and "absolutely perfect" (absolutely, indicating excellent or extremely poor), when the funny content is replied to in xswl (laughing at me), some people's worries also arise - the emotions that each other wants to convey may be "seconds to understand", but the richer and more specific content may also be sacrificed in a high degree of simplification and generalization, full of yyds floating, but it seems difficult to grasp something. The scene applicability of universal buzzwords is so high, will this promote the inertia of people to think and express, which in turn will lead to the emergence of expressive aphasia? After all, language is the carrier of thought, and "imagining a language means imagining a way of life."
In addition, it is interesting to note that such buzzwords are mostly presented as "comparative level" or even "highest level", and frequent use will inevitably accelerate the consumption of language meaning and cause language inflation. When online social networking needs to replace "hahahaha" to express a happy state, what should be used in the future to express the same content of emotions and content as "yyds"? Will the inflation of language and the increasing scarcity of expression also affect our perception of some emotions and distances?
As the society as the soil of buzzwords continues to change, the collective mood continues to change, new buzzwords will continue to emerge, and some of the current buzzwords will be gradually forgotten and gradually withdrawn from the stage. And, like "fashion", when a buzzword loses its role as a subcultural group identity and segmentation, then the new popularity will be reshaped and launched, achieving continuous changes in the functional rotation of demarcation and imitation. Therefore, we may not have to worry too much about the yyds of the screen at present, how to avoid unconsciously falling into the new seemingly free shackles after stepping out of the old discourse shackles, but it is worth our self-vigilance.
(The author is a media commentator)
Source: Guangming Daily Client