Wen Wang Zhongzhong
I have to admit that the world is full of people.
The most popular aesthetic trend on the Internet in 2021 should be the useless aesthetic style.
"Beauty is useless", withdrawing material needs and utilitarianism, leaving only the purest "beauty". Young people who are impressed by "useless aesthetics" use this "beauty" to escape the inertial thinking of "function first" and jump out of the rules and regulations of rational reality and utilitarian thinking.
The kitten sitting on the "picture frame" will say a useless aesthetic after reading it, yyds. / Screenshot of useless aesthetic Douban group
In other words, we crave purposeless happiness more than ever.
Following this logic, we quickly found the person on the Internet who is the most "happy", the editor of the "UC Shock Department".
"What's going on with XX? Today Xiaobian will help you understand... Well, that's what XX means and where it comes from. ”
It seems like a long talk, but in fact it doesn't say anything. In order to thank the useless pleasure brought by this "small editor's body", this session of netizens knocked down a respectful comment and praised - listening to a seat of jun, such as listening to a seat.
Praise a person for talking nonsense well, just one sentence - you come to work at UC tomorrow. / unsplash
The cold humor brought about by the ineffectual repetition has become the lowest-cost means for this session of netizens to please themselves.
Overnight, everyone falls into the rabbit hole of "you put this here" and becomes Alice roaming the world of nonsense. Useless happiness is the only adventure we want to find.
One is a date tree,
The other is also a date tree
"In my back garden, I can see two trees outside the wall, one is a date tree, and the other is also a date tree."
The people who painstakingly wrote down reading comprehension on the language test papers in an attempt to analyze what Mr. Lu Xun wanted to express have now turned themselves into "contemporary Zhou Shuren".
If they were asked to analyze the answers and write them again now, they would probably write "Mr. Lu Xun wrote these two jujube trees because there were two jujube trees in his back garden."
In general, language has three major functions: to convey information, to perceive the world, and to communicate as a means of communication. And the contemporary Zhou Shu people carry forward the fourth function of language - talking and playing.
Gossip or "kandashan" is one of the oldest and most convenient ways of leisure and pastimes of mankind. The so-called "many things in ancient and modern times are all laughed at", and "laughing talk" is the biggest meaning of these "one-seat words" - funny.
But talking nonsense is also a technical job, and it is even more difficult to turn nonsense into "jokes". B station UP master @ flower hedge Liu Xiaodao's "nonsense tutorial" - "Teach you how to say nonsense correctly", has been played more than 3 million times.
Seriously, it's time for class! Tips: At present, "The Art of Nonsense" has been released to version 2.0. / Bilibili screenshot
In the video comment area, there are humble and studious "Xueba" netizens who even summarized the outline points for everyone and handed over a "full score answer sheet".
With just a few tips, you can become a joker:
1. Synonymous substitution:
Students who have not yet started school, the school should not have opened yet.
2. Turning little playful:
Now the homework is almost finished students, come on, there should be a lot of unfinished it.
3. Anencephalic repetition:
Students whose homework has not yet been written, the homework has not been completed. Students who have not finished their homework can finish their homework immediately, and they use the time to write their homework.
If you really can't remember, you only need to remember the only criterion - repetition, because "funny is repetition".
In fact, in the funny world, the status of "repetition" has never been ignored. Whether it is comedy movies, soap operas, variety shows at home and abroad, or talk shows, cross-talk, etc., the use of "repetition" to create laughter is almost a default common point, and it can appear in all occasions where humor appears.
Whether you call it a back-and-forth connection, a buried stem, a baggage, a call back... Essentially, they are all repeating what has appeared before, using the means of "repetition".
Why does meaningless repetition make people laugh?
The French philosopher Henri Bergson has explored comics extensively in His book Laughter, and humor arises because of the contrast between the situation described in the joke and reality, which breaks our expectations of the empirical world.
The effect of ineffective repetition is exactly like this, and the sudden meaningless backtracking makes people scratch their heads, but there is a sense of drama and pompous funny.
When we hear "Listen to the King's Words", we naturally think of "Reading ten years of books". But repeating "like listening to a seat" again becomes a "difference" outside the expected result, "listening to a seat of the king, like listening to a seat of words", how, you laughed? This kind of unexpected repetition is the laughing point of common nonsense.
After reading this passage, you have gained nothing, that is, the biggest "harvest". / Screenshot of Weibo
People repeat repetitive jokes, self-deprecating and ridiculing. So what if it doesn't feel funny? Congratulations, at least you wasted precious minutes of your life.
Nonsense is art
In modern times, nonsense has undoubtedly become a large-scale collective performance art. In the final analysis, it is probably to blame everyone for carrying forward the basic introductory technique of "making up word counts" too much.
When I was a child, I wrote articles and managed to fill 800 small squares, and when I grew up, I had to "reply to comments of no less than 15 words" when I visited a forum. In the era of self-media prevalence, the 3,000 words you see in each article are behind the three thousand strands of hair that the editors have lost. Not to mention the work reports, PPTs and personal summaries that appear in turn at the end of the year, all of which are "grinding little goblins".
The pain of the year-end report, everyone understands. / Movie "Wanted"
An enthusiastic classmate who did not want to be named and was preparing for graduate school shared some of his experiences. How to expand the five words of "doing things seriously" into a paragraph?
"Overcoming luck mentality, paralyzing thoughts, lax emotions, perfunctory attitudes, slack performance, reckless behavior, sloppy practices, insisting on not engaging in copingism, formalism, and superficiality"... Use these words and sentences to classify points to say.
Common words such as "overcome and persist" can also be replaced by other verbs, such as vigilance against paralyzing thoughts, putting an end to scrupulous behavior, and preventing slack performance.
In this moment, the repetitive "nonsense" is no longer nonsense, but "repeatedly expounded wording".
Good nonsense is talking, understanding artistry, and literary language.
Well said, but I chose to shut up. / The Movie Pulp Fiction
"Writing articles, especially novels and essays, is nonsense. The so-called language art is the art of nonsense. Writer Han Shishan unceremoniously classified writers (including himself) as "nonsense experts", and wrote articles with no words to find words, depending on whether you can make this statement a little interesting and let people see it.
The language essay question "The Choice of the Mind" in the national volume of the 2002 college entrance examination has a full score essay. It begins with the following: "Life is in the world, saying that it is long and long for tens of thousands of days, and it is far away; it is said that it is short and hurried for dozens of autumns, and it is said that it is a stroke of a finger." When people grow up in rivers, we often need to make choices. ”
Having said all this, in fact, only the words "life needs to choose" have been said. But its so-called excellence is largely due to "nonsense".
In the eyes of the expressor, there is never nonsense, because expression always has meaning.
The "Love in" trilogy is a typical "talking movie", the people inside the play are chattering, and the audience outside the picture can always find resonance in these non-stop words. / "Love Before Midnight"
What is the meaning of expressing "nonsense"? Zhu Ziqing once talked about the evolution of people's understanding of language expression, and in the twentieth century, "ninety-nine percent of people's conversation is no more meaningful than the humming of flies."
The purpose of the conversation is no longer to convey the idea, but to "hum". But we are willing to hum, willing to prove that we are a living person and not a wax man.
Maybe that's what we mean by constantly repeating nonsense. Its meaning lies in the "meaning" of the expressor himself outside of "no meaning" to others.
Aphasia Self-Help Alliance
The future of every popular Internet phrase is doomed to be overdone, and it is the same on "listening to the words of the king, as if listening to a seat". Because what makes them popular is not a short-lived viral recurrence, but the new attitude of the young people behind them.
Buzzwords are iterating faster and faster, and increasingly reflect the mood of the times. If you look back at the buzzwords of 2020, their position is becoming more and more obvious.
2021 is not over yet, and several buzzwords have passed. / Language and Writing Weekly
Inner rolls, rice cooks, workers, small towns, chicken babies... These online words express the overall situation of young people, and the language gradually moves from sublime to "sublime". Ordinary people can use these words countless times, understand daily life, make themselves more and more identified with this position, and also find their own companions.
At the same time, more and more young people are beginning to realize that they are experiencing word aphasia. According to a 2019 survey by China Youth Daily, 76.5% of respondents admitted that their language is becoming increasingly poor.
In Internet communication, because the body is not present, it must rely on intermediaries, and the infernality of language is manifested in the inflation and depreciation of these unified buzzwords. People find that stronger words can express the same meaning, so the language is becoming more and more exaggerated. Good-looking performances are all "fried", and there is only one way of expression called "fairy fight", and there are only two words of praise - absolutely.
It is we who make cinema a reality. / Movie "1984"
The habit of relying on buzzwords eventually leads to the laziness of the head, as George W. Bush did. Orwell's warning in 1984: reduce vocabulary, narrow the scope of ideas, and eventually there is no vocabulary.
"I dare say that you must have thought that our main job was to create new words. Not at all! We are eliminating the old word - dozens, hundreds, every day. We cut the language down to just the skeleton. ”
Now we are all the ones who cut language into skeletons.
The "Word Aphasia Mutual Aid Alliance" group established in Douban in early 2021 has now reached 130,000 group members. Every aphasia person here goes through practice in the hope of getting rid of literal aphasia. The team members asked each other questions and forced themselves to express themselves.
The ineffectual and repetitive crap epidemic may also be a kind of unconscious self-help signal that we are sending.
Humor allows us to peek into another world, thus making us realize the absurdity of the world we live in now. But humor is not salvation, it comforts us and makes us realize that the world is unique and that neither we nor those in it are perfect. We can't escape, we can only try to change in this world.
It's good to say something, it's good to say something nonsense, as long as we still insist on expressing it.
Resources
"On nonsense, the basis of the existence of nonsense and its enlightenment to language teaching" Fan Yuanbo | East China Normal University
Full of nonsense? The laughter of the young people is getting stranger and stranger| One read
Why there are no memes and pop memes, we can't say good things | Tower Gate