This article is from the WeChat public account: Interface Skew Institute (ID: wonder-capsule) < span class = "text-remarks">, author: Meng state, Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

If you are a southerner who has no northern friends and does not listen to crosstalk, you may not know how wild the word “harm” is.

Now whenever you surf the Internet, you will meet a lot of spontaneous cross talk performance artists, to show you in all directions how broad the scope of the word “harm” and the polysemous emotional expression. You may not understand at first what the meaning of the harm at the beginning of each sentence comes from, but it doesn’t matter, you will soon be unable to stop “harm”.

Before becoming a buzzword on the Internet, “harm” existed in a dialect system in the north, especially in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei, with a tone of four tones, indicating a sudden realization or trifle, such as “hai, you Speak early “,” hai, it’s okay “, but there is no official regulation to uniformly use written words. The Xinhua dictionary has the homophone “嗐” and an interjection, which means sadness or regret: Oh, don’t mention him. In “Dream of Red Mansions”, there is such a sentence: What is good, what do you feel dejected? Another tone of “咍” has the same meaning as the old one, “cough”, interjection: 咍! I really shouldn’t be like this! It is the harmony word in the operas of the Yuan and Ming dynasties in China, which strengthens the rhythm of the music.

Many of the post-90s generation’s initial impressions of the “hai” sound may come from the childhood drama “Family with Children”, telling a living standard that we still envy 14 years later to reorganize Beijing families. Contributors Liu Xing and his nemesis Liu Mei in the play are all Beijingers. When processing the lines, they fully demonstrated the charm of the Beijing accent, and mixed a lot of northern habits between the mother and son’s laughter and scolding. Modal particles such as “hey” and “harm”. Many dialects have special vocabulary that are not available in Mandarin, which makes these discourses novel to audiences who are accustomed to Putonghua film and television works.

Although the use of hai by the northerners in daily life has been amazing, the first time that hai officially entered the online world as “harm” is still popular in “NMSL”, “mmp”, “I can” There was a bloody way in the language, and with its unique universality and accurate restoration of the four sounds in the dialect, it quickly caught the heart of the goose. But no one can accurately determine who caused the “harm” tide. It is more like an old wine made in a dialect, and it happens to be in a new bottle on the Internet.

No one can ignore the huge role of contemporary girls in Internet circles in promoting Internet buzzwords. There is a cliché in sociolinguistics that young women are often at the forefront of language change-avant-garde native speakers. A study of correspondence between 1417 and 1681 showed that female correspondents were the first to adapt to new expressions such as “does / has / makes” and to eliminate old usages such as “doth / hath / maketh”.

In this entertainment era where everything is a rice circle, every inadvertent Weibo can become a large rice circle girl censorship scene after two minutes. They are everywhere, they are omnipotent, and they build a love high-rise building with their neat or passionate text. So once a word or sentence is used by them, you willIn the next few months, I saw it frequently, and from the beginning, I couldn’t understand it, and later I shouted really fragrant.

It is said that the earliest large-scale use of “harm” on Weibo to express feelings was the fans of “Youth Has You” and the official Weibo of Mengniu, the title merchant of this draft show. Another wave of climax was when Xiao Zhan went to the B battle sweep in July and gave an employee a message board with “When are you coming, Xiao Zhan?” This question answered “Harm! I am not here!”. Gradually, the word “harm” was well known and became a favorite word for many people at the end of 19 years.

Picture Source: Douban

Of course, the popularity of harm is also closely related to the popularity of cross talk in recent years. In the cross talk performance system, “harm” is more commonly seen in the performance of speech. Excellent supporters, in addition to the words can not fall to the ground, but also echo each other with tease. Every time he sees the word “harm”, he can automatically make up for his friends who are standing on the stage happily looking at Guo Degang’s picture. They are all true love fans of cross talk.

In fact, social is sometimes like a cross talk, you come and go, and constantly throw stalks and opinions. In real communication, we can often express emotions through expressions and tone. On online social platforms, it is difficult to accurately convey your emotions to the other party based on cold text alone. So when you use some well-known online vocabulary, you can effectively express emotions and reduce the embarrassment of communication. The response at the beginning of a “harm” instantly injects a sense of life into this simple line of text, as if you two were chatting and snotting at the village head, instead of striking each other with their heads ten meters apart Keyboard 唠嗑.

The beauty of harm is also that there are 1,000 kinds of “harm” notes in a thousand people’s minds. It just sits there quietly, letting you savor it carefully, is it suddenly realized, sour, helpless, or detached or regretful? As if a “harm” can explain everything, pave the perfect admission mood for the following sentence, so that people on the screen can smile and feel the connection with your heart.

The editorial department loves to use “harm” to chat daily

The word “harm” in the current context is more a kind of self-mockery and defensive emotion. Face the troughs and peaks in life honestly, admit your mediocrity, eat lemons frankly to express your admiration for others, and comfort yourself with a “harm”. The high-repost poisonous chicken soup review area everywhere on Weibo is the high-frequency case finding place of self-consolation. Sometimes it’s better to get the same painful resonance than to get the itchiness of the boots. After all, seeing thousands of people mocking and comforting ordinary people and participating in this carnival that embraces themselves with “harm” is the best cure.

This is not the first time dialect has become a popular internet buzzword. From the “blue skinny shiitake mushroom” in the video recorded by the Guangxi brother after falling out of love, to the Sichuan anchor dialect “mmp” in the game anchor, this kind of earthy but unique and intimate dialect seems to capture the collective emotions of netizens more easily. Began to attack from the dialect to the popular popular. We increasingly like to avoid esoteric and obscure sentences, express all intense emotions with a simple “recession”, lower the threshold of expression and aesthetic standards, appreciate the straightforward language and praise the “good words”, This is a kind of dissolution and resistance of affirmative network society to the language rights once dominated by elite culture.

Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (Bronisław Malinowski) The concept of communicative communication (Phatic Communion) was first proposed in “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages”: the purpose of establishing relationships in communicative communication Instead of communicating effective information. Network languages ​​are not pure communication tools.

When we add this optional “harm” in front of each sentence, the action is actually looking for a spiritual connection with other people to create a cultural resonance. As long as you participate, you have a place in the Internet collective, a recognized identity. When you use the buzzwords of a circle, from another perspective you also become part of the formation of the circle culture, so as to obtain a sense of collective identity and accepted security.

Harm, it’s done.

This article is from the WeChat public account: Interface Skew Institute (ID: wonder-capsule) < span class = "text-remarks">, author: Meng state