Imagine: you're in a restaurant, everything's going well, the weather's fine, you're enjoying yourself on the terrace, and you're eating fries. You ask for mayonnaise, and then... the drama begins! There's no mayonnaise! In the old days, you'd have told a friend: “I was upset, the fries without mayo kind of spoiled the fun”.
The other day, in the subway, I happened to overhear exactly that conversation. And the girl who was telling her friend about it concluded with: “I had so much hate!”
I went home, looked at the Larousse dictionnary who says:
- Have hatred: colloquial, to experience a very keen feeling of disappointment and resentment.
- Deception: n.f. The state or feeling of being disappointed, deceived in one's expectations...
- Resentment: n.m. To remember something bitterly, or to seek revenge for a wrong or injustice.
There was no mayonnaise to go with her fries, so she felt cheated in her expectation and/or she remembers it with bitterness and would like to take revenge for this "injustice"? But in what world do you feel that way because you didn't get mayonnaise with your fries?
Yes, I know: she didn't mean it in the strict sense. But why did she say it then? What's the point of saying something you don't really mean? Why overplay everything, why this language inflation?
Simply because we're used to it. And I plead guilty. I am part of this generation that found all "cool" or "genius", the rest being either "crap" or "lame". So yes, I participated in this verbal one-upmanship. Except at the time, we used to treat ourselves as stupid, crazy, looser, idiot or asshole and just if we were driving.
Then, as an adult, I saw, year after year, the boundaries dissolve, the children started calling each other “asshole” from kindergarten. In primary school, the girls would call each other “slut” and then “dirty whore”, for nothing or not much at all. Here again, 99% of them had only a vague idea of the true meaning of the insult they were using and what it implied. But if they used it, it was because they had heard it. Where? Who said it? Who was it aimed at? At school, I saw jail vocabulary spreading to the playgrounds: “Go on, I'm not a snitch!”, “That new English teacher is fresh” and so on.
So we come back to an idea already mentioned in this blog, namely the loss of nuance. When the slightest thing is “too great” or even “too cool”, or, conversely, we get so “pissed off” at the slightest annoyance, when we want to “screw you over” at the slightest conflict, the bar is set very high. And quite logically, when the floor rises, the ceiling is blown apart. Exit the “not bad”, “nice”, “interesting” and even “good”. Goodbye to the “annoyed”, “irritated”, “displeased”. We have hatred and that's it!
OMG Amazing, Awesome !!!
As usual, the trend came from the United States. I've been to quite a few music fairs and other events there. In the US, for a long time now, everything has been “so great”, “fantastic”, “amazing”, “awesome”, “unbelievable”, “unmatched” etc., and the more basic the stuff, like insipid or even crap, the more dithyrambic the adjective. Once you've got the hang of it, you'll soon realize that marketing and advertising are driving this inflation of language, snapping up new expressions and popularizing them at breakneck speed. In return, the masses pick them up, add another layer and the cycle starts all over again.
Add to this the social networks, with their procession of memes, shares and virality, further multiplying the popularity and impact of these new ways of expressing ourselves, and it's not long before you find yourself “on the floor” in front of a video of a little cat that's “too kawaii”, instead of being touched and moved by a video of an adorable kitten. Because yes, this inflation is accelerating and internationalizing. We're borrowing words from all over the world because we've forgotten the tools our own language offers. We no longer know that “adorable” exists, or we think it's a corny word. Or that would reveal our sensitivity in too crude a fashion. Then there's the inevitable “too”, a kind of language “cream pie” (too much, too good, too crazy, too no, too beautiful, too nice/nasty, etc.). And there you have it: too kawaii !
This video is "too deadly", LOL, but "OMG! WTF?" Did he fall on the diver? "LMFAO" #epicfail.
And there's more to come, as the uberization of our society, the race for the 15 minutes of fame, the need for “visibility”, pushes us all to exaggerate, to communicate on steroids to attract the already over-solicited attention of our current “followers” or “prospects”. This is how pictorial language is also affected by puffery. Just take a look at YT and you'll be bombarded by thumbnails in which authors make improbable faces to illustrate their titles, each one more “clickbait” than the last. At first, when you're not yet used to the process, you click and you either come across something uninteresting because the guy has nothing to say, or something average (by the way, average now means crap), or a total intellectual rip-off. In short, the promise isn't kept, and after a while, all this mumbo jumbo just makes you want to puke.
Houba Houba!
And I'm not standing out from the crowd, I don't consider myself above the fray, not at all! I'm just trying to point out that the combination of the proliferation of networks, the advent of smartphones, tablets and computers, the increasing precariousness of most professions and activities, and the instantaneity of communications, means that anyone who wants to get a message out there, make their creations known, get noticed in any field whatsoever, has to improvise as a writer, videographer, actor, marketing strategist, self-promoter, AI whiz or whatever.
Except that millions of us are “producing content”, a horrible expression that should have set alarm bells ringing from the start of this societal, media, pictorial and linguistic drift. And very few of us are mastering the whole chain. As a result, many of them don't mince their words, and “market” themselves with a bulldozer! Have you ever watched the poorly made makeup tutorials by “influencers” on YT that little girls in primary and secondary school gorge on? Go take a look. For many of them, that's the dream and it explains why we regularly come across 12-year-olds with 5 mm of colored foundation on their faces, false eyelashes and eyebrows plucked and redrawn in the latest fashion.
To exist, “content producers” have to imitate the most “popular” among them, who are often also the sluttiest. As a result, they are all reduced to grimacing, fidgeting and talking like... monkeys... With little vocabulary, lots of facial expressions and movements, slapping their chests and shouting louder than the neighbor. I know what I just wrote isn't very nice to monkeys.
It is therefore not just a question of inflated language, poor in intellectual nutrients, hence the disappearance of finesse, accuracy and precision. The evolution of our language is indeed a reflection of our world, of its excesses, of its constantly accelerating degradation. Yes, our world is getting stale. But... YOLO!!!
Wesh Bro !
