How much richness of Chinese expression has the “universal” YYDS dissolved?
What do these buzzwords have in common? Why have they become an unstoppable linguistic fashion trend? What impacts do they have on Chinese expressions?
When we come to perceive something, we often use the common, obvious, familiar, easy to understand to know the more hidden, unfamiliar, abstract, subtle. We use “the known” to perceive “the unknown”.
Chinese body metaphorsusually take body parts, body structures, functions, shapes, etc. as the source domain and then project them into the target domain, thus forming a metaphor.
Perhaps those who are concerned about, even just a little, healthy diet are now looking for products with the word ‘zero’ on the packaging when buying foods. The most popular ones at the moment are “zero cane sugar”, “free of additive”, “zero fat”, “zero calories” and so on. On the packaging of many products, the word “zero” is even highlighted and magnified. The word “zero” is in a large font on the packaging of “Uno”.
This is the new meaning, carrying with the colour of this new “Public Health” age, of “zero” in the field of food products.
I realized that I (we) tend to have a vague understanding of such terms involving transnational/multicultural identities. Since most of the time the context doesn’t allow misunderstand, we don’t distinguish such terms.
It matters that we should not equal ‘内卷’ with ‘竞争’. ‘内卷’ is just a kind of vicious and destructive competition, of which the result can only be a vicious circle. While a lot of ‘竞争’ can be good and benign as they’re for common progress and growth. Here’s one way to understand how ‘内卷’ got today’s meaning: All the people are drawn into (被卷入) a closed competition whirlpool, where everyone is painful and unable to do whatever he or she wants.