Do you know what it means to "cook, stir-fry"?
Recently, a large number of posts on the theme of "cooking" have appeared on major social platforms, and they are called "cooking literature".
These posts often attract people's attention with enticing titles such as "Cooking every day after living with my boyfriend", "I haven't cooked for a long time, I want to cook", "I hope my boyfriend can live to be eighty years old and cook every day......
These titles make people mistakenly think they're tutorials that teach cooking techniques or share the process of making food, but you only know when you click in;
It turns out that the words "cooking" and "stir-frying" have evolved like this.
Referring to women's breasts as "landmines" and further subdividing them into "big mines", "medium mines" and "ordinary basic mines" is not only disrespectful to women, but also a manifestation of objectifying women.
What is even more worrying is that this kind of insulting word, not only from the ridicule of ill-intentioned people, but even some women themselves are accustomed to using it, which is undoubtedly a debasement of self-worth.
In the same way, words like "husband" and "husband" seem to become hot, and must be said to be "roommate" and "teammate".
And most surprisingly, some people even refer to their husbands as "pregnant partners......
You will find that modern people are no longer able to speak well, and some of the original normal words are being superficialized and stigmatized:
In recent years, there have been some words on the Internet that make fun of women's intimate products and physiological phenomena.
For example, the breast patch is called "milk cap", the sanitary napkin is called "bread", the birth of a child is called "unloading", and pregnancy is described as "a little pregnant woman is pricked and bulging by her husband's baby"
Not only does this bad taste lack respect for women, but it also affects netizens who just want to share their daily lives normally.
When some netizens posted home-cooked tutorials, the comment area was full of ridicule that had nothing to do with the theme and was full of bad taste, such as "It's this cooking tutorial, I thought it was that"
shared the selfie with her good friend, but the other party's first sentence made her second monk confused: "Ask for a big thunder tutorial"
People who like to drink milk tea can no longer look directly at the word "milk cap" and don't understand why a very normal feminine product becomes ashamed to say it......
We who are ashamed of this and that every day, and who have been ashamed all our lives, have become scarce, superficial, vulgar and unaware of our language system.
Indeed, today's popular web language seems to be increasingly unique and abstract, making it feel elusive at times.
Depression, which was originally taken seriously, is now jokingly called "jade syndrome" on the Internet, and this understatement undoubtedly weakens the understanding and respect for real mental illness.
PUA, a term that originally referred to emotional manipulation, has also been creatively transformed into CPU, KTV, PPT, ICU and other terms.
When describing someone as "squirming and cringing", it is now fashionable to use neologisms such as "stealing a lot";
In the domestic entertainment industry, marketing methods are endless. The celebrities' figures are subtly described as "so thin" rather than simply using the word "thin".
When praising someone's excellence in a certain field, it is now popular to use the phrase "the ancient Greek god in charge of XX";
On the hot search, we can often see such a scene: the gods of ancient Greece seem to have become Chinese, and various topics unrelated to ancient Greek mythology are named "ancient Greece".
Elementary school students are full of "You old 6", "I'll strangle a bean", "Barbie Q", "Come on Hey!" ABC！ ”
When swearing, he viciously shouts, "Let's have fun again!" As if cursing the other party for reincarnation
And this kind of simplistic, superficial, and viral buzzword is now frequently appearing in our daily conversations. When everyone is like a parrot who only follows the trend and repeats those popular memes, we can't help but ask: is this kind of exchange really meaningful?
In the long run, we may find ourselves in a situation of word exhaustion;
Previously, China Youth Daily conducted a survey of 2,002 young people, and the results showed:
More than half of the respondents said that their language and writing skills had declined in recent years. More worryingly, a whopping 47.1% of young people feel that their vocabulary is lacking, and their expressions have become monotonous and lack depth.
This phenomenon of word poverty has gradually evolved into a kind of "word aphasia".
In daily communication, people are becoming more and more accustomed to using popular Internet "memes" instead of real thinking and expression.
When it is difficult to find suitable words to describe the emotions and thoughts in the heart, the language becomes more and more impoverished, and even the words are insincere.
Chen Yuan, the father of Chinese sociolinguistics, once issued a deafening warning: "What is the true value of language if our daily lives are filled with many languages that seem to be correct but can no longer convey any valid information?" This is undoubtedly a language pollution disaster that we have experienced. ”
Those tainted and distorted words, such as "cooking", "thunder", "milk cap", "jade disease", etc., are like tiny doses of poison that unwittingly erodes our thinking, cognition, and understanding of the world.
Of course, sometimes it's not that netizens are reluctant to communicate in a more formal and in-depth way, but that they face many limitations in practice. Various online platforms are flooded with a large number of blocking words, so that many people have to "self-castrate" before making statements.
For example, at a music festival last year, singer Chen Li sang her masterpiece "Flammable and Explosive". There is a line in the lyrics of this song, "If you want me to be beautiful, you want me to kill people without blinking"
As a result, on the giant screen, the word "kill" in the lyrics is ruthlessly harmonized into an empty "mouth" word. In order to avoid sensitive words, the original normal lyrics became more sensitive.
Faced with this situation, netizens began to be creative and played with memes like crazy. They put some film and television titles or lines into a similar harmony, and as a result, these tampered works instantly become intriguing.
There is also a New Year's Eve online concert in a certain year, and the platform changed the lyrics of a rock song "Long Live Love" on Mayday to nondescript:
"Let me kiss you, kiss you, kiss you until dawn" was changed to "Let me ask you, ask you, ask you until dawn." ”
If you don't understand, just ask, is this a relationship or an interrogation of a prisoner?
It is no wonder that some normal physiological phenomena and adult behaviors should be described by various obscure pronouns: cooking, stir-frying, milk cover...
It's not just a joke, but also because of the helplessness of avoiding risks in this shameful context of talking about sexual perversion.
The famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics profoundly reveals the close connection between language, culture and thinking.
This hypothesis states that when language diversity is limited, i.e., language becomes homogeneous, people's thoughts and feelings tend to be correspondingly homogeneous.
In the current context, it is not difficult to see this trend. When we use words like "cooking" and "stir-fry" to refer to sex, "big thunder" to tease women's breasts, or "CPU" to understate the otherwise serious phenomenon of "PUA", we are actually weakening the deep meaning and seriousness behind these words.
In the same way, when we are describing food, we are no longer looking for unique words to convey the deliciousness of the food, but frequently use Internet buzzwords such as "YYDS", "Who understands the gold content of this mouthful", "I don't allow anyone who hasn't eaten this", we are also unconsciously lowering our language skills.
What's even more worrying is that when we go on a trip and share photos, the copy often becomes the same: "Once in a lifetime, we have to go anywhere and where".
Our language is becoming impoverished, and along with this barrenness, our minds are starving, and our cognition is becoming shallow. This trend cannot be ignored, it is like a hidden clue that gradually erodes our spiritual world.
As the well-known blogger "Celtic Grapefruit" profoundly pointed out: "The lack of language will make us dull, because language is the cornerstone of thinking, and the boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world."
My language, my corpus, they broaden the dimension of my understanding of the world. It is only when the language becomes delicate that our thinking becomes delicate. ”
In order to break out of this cycle of polluted language affecting thinking, we can try the following three methods:
(1) Immerse yourself in serious books that are full of wisdom and insight, and listen to those insights that are not mass-produced. It will nourish our hearts like a clear spring, enrich our language, and broaden our horizons.
(2) Refine our words, use less vague and broad pronouns, and strive to find the most appropriate words for our thoughts. This not only helps us to express ourselves better, but also stimulates us to think deeply about the world.
(3) Consciously cultivate the ability to think deeply, and constantly exercise our thinking through writing output or participating in debates. Let the thinking be sublimated in the collision of words, and let the language become richer in thinking.
The sentence in "Butterfly with Steel Seal" rings like a wake-up call: "In the past, we thought that the way to eliminate a culture was to eliminate its language, but now my mind has changed, and the only way to eliminate a culture is to degenerate its language." "Let's work together to resist those vulgar, superficial internet buzzwords and refuse to let them occupy our minds.
May we all protect the complexity of our minds, maintain our thirst and pursuit of knowledge, and keep our minds clear and independent thinking.
In this era of information explosion, let us use reading as a shield and thinking as a sword to jointly protect our rich and colorful spiritual world.