Don't Be an "Onlooker": We'll Tell You 50 "Truths" About 2016 | QDaily Dictionary Year-End Summary

We picked the industry-playbook words you have heard but never quite understood, the ones that need a second translation; and we coined a few of our own, to sum up the subtle changes and new experiences this year brought to daily life.

In 2016, your life may have looked something like this:

• You answered the call — "live in the moment," "buy early and enjoy it early, buy late and beg for it in tears," "regret it for three days if you buy, for three years if you don't" — and bought and bought and bought, and your quality of life still felt a little short.
• You went to the cinema less but watched plenty of noise about movies: glad for Leonardo DiCaprio, angry at the Golden Rooster and Golden Horse results, mystified by director Guo Jingming's tears.
• You used fewer internet-to-your-door services but memorized no shortage of startup con-artist vocabulary — fan economy, overtaking on the curve, phenomenal breakout hit — and watched, amused, as the startup tide rose and fell, washing away who knows how many lunatics, swindlers and kids.
• You could never find a Mobike nearby when you needed one, and the time you spent hunting for something to watch over dinner would have covered two more meals.
• ...

We picked a set of words, about spending money and about the internet. They may be the industry-playbook terms you have heard but never quite understood, the ones that need a second translation; and we coined a few of our own, to sum up the subtle changes and new experiences this year brought to daily life.

As for the buzzwords that got the heaviest use this year — "lán shòu xiāng gū," an accented mangling of "miserable, want to cry," and "a small goal" — you won't find them in this dictionary. Media headlines and marketing can grab attention by being sensational, but we don't think formula, cliché and posturing deserve applause.

If we have a goal, it is probably Flaubert's in the Dictionary of Received Ideas: to mock, gently, the received opinions, prejudices and settled conclusions of contemporary life. To hand you a world not blinded by clichés —

In 2017, none of us should be a so-called "onlooker."

【Year One】A point in time that announces "the great undertaking begins here." The great undertaking always begins badly, so Year One comes back every year. Year One of virtual reality, Year One of artificial intelligence: every year is Year One.

【Harsh Winter】A cautious pessimism that announces "the future will be harder still." The verdict gets gloomier every year, so Harsh Winter comes back every year — the employment Harsh Winter, the capital Harsh Winter, every year is a Harsh Winter. It is also a basic lens for looking at contemporary society: turn it on a social problem and you look profound, since pessimism rarely draws fire.

【Box Office Cold Snap】After last year's warm spring, the film industry, at full boil, took a bucket of ice water to the chest. At the start of the year the whole industry ambitiously set a 60-billion-yuan target to overtake the United States; by the end of it the industry had posted four straight months of negative growth and was crawling on all fours to hit its KPIs. An industry trend that makes insiders wring their hands and the public cheer — the "crooked merchant falls in the ditch" kind.

【Box Office】The GDP of the film market. (Entry contributed by QDaily reporter Han Honggang.)

【Publicity-Period Personality】A persecution complex that appears in Chinese film directors around the release of the "big production" they poured their hearts into. Symptoms: fragile nerves, easy tears, easy rage, and a readiness to publish open letters cursing people out.

【The Innovation Bind of Celebrity Personas】It is very hard now for a star to find a one-of-a-kind position. The public had barely coined "full of dominant energy" before ten actresses were wall-slamming somebody; a set of "ascetic type" criteria had barely been invented before it covered a hundred wooden-faced actors. Stars with no special label left to claim can only go on one reality show after another and hope to land an accurate persona soon. The difficulty of innovation, entertainment-industry edition.

【Social Media Highlight Moment】The unprecedented, heated scene that forms when you criticize a performer in earnest and their fans arrive in formation to demand, "Do you know how hard they work?" Your moment of greatest presence on the internet this year, and your most miserable.

【Fans】Did not conquer the world, but did conquer the film-award juries.

【The Contemporary Religious Predicament】Today's religious organizations are too many and too tangled. Cute Cult Leader, Sweetheart Cult Leader and Fashion Cult Leader for Lin Chi-ling, Rainie Yang and Cyndi Wang we could live with; now even Teacher Xiao P is called the "Beauty Cult Leader." On the question of religious leadership, everyone can smell usurpation in the air. "Topping up your faith," meanwhile, has become far too everyday — especially when buying a 99-yuan wristband counts as topping up your faith, and the thing won't hold a charge and goes back to the factory the very next day, leaving you with a sense of how easily faith collapses. (@Gong Jian, contributing researcher, QDaily Research Lab)

【Parachuted-In Buzzwords】The "sense of gain," "top-level design" and other buzzwords of the year that official media pick each December, and that nobody has ever heard anyone say.

【Dean-of-Students-Style Ad Copy】Advertising as a set of orders. The difference from an actual dean of students is that one tells you not to waste money — "no jewelry, no perms or dye" — while the other wants you to spend more, preferably all of it here: "You don't like vegetables, so you need to drink juice." "Overtime is hard, you need to drink juice." "A man's wardrobe: visit Heilan Home twice a year." A distinctive kind of marketing, anxious to raise you right.

【New Year's Homework】The comic "based on Eastern culture" zodiac designs that luxury brands roll out for each new year. Dior's little rooster on a red cord, which looks uncannily like the Sina logo; LV's monkey, in which no Chinese flavor is visible but an alien one is. Put on a Burberry scarf embroidered with the character for "fortune," pull out an Armani red "fortune" highlighter compact, and you have a new-century master class in tacky chinoiserie.

【Reply TD to Unsubscribe】A meaningless text-message suffix. Reply, and the next day a different number sends you the same thoughtful reminder to "open the app and claim your coupon." Repeated testing shows this is the standard signature of e-commerce companies everywhere — an unspoken convention.

【Macau's First Online Casino】Warm and persistent, checks in on you on a schedule, uses emoji fluently to convey abundant feeling: this year's replacement for the China Mobile hotline 10086 as the best stand-in boyfriend.

【Lifestyle Experience Store】Inflation in the naming of physical shops; even a store selling imported fruit and vegetables now calls itself a lifestyle experience store. Browsing one, beyond "I spent a fortune on the fit-out" and "I sell everything," you never work out which lifestyle you were supposed to be experiencing.

【Expired Keywords】Product-search keywords so overused they no longer do their job. "Korean version" will not find you wearable Korean clothes; "British style" gets you a screen of red plaid whose checks never line up; and as for "streetwear label," you will only turn up a thousand photos of Edison Chen smirking and Shawn Yue tilting his chin. Keeping your keywords updated to the most accurate ones and finding the matching product fast is by now a core part of modern shopping literacy.

【Subsidy-Vacuum Financial Crisis】The money trouble that follows when the apps stop burning cash and you have to spend far more than before on food delivery, taxis, movies, manicures and laundry. The sum is so large you can barely remember how you used to hail a cab or order dinner.

【Subsidy-Migration Lifestyle】As subsidies change direction and strength, household budgets and personal behavior change with them. This year you may start hailing a cab before the movie ends, because cabs have got harder to catch; you may prefer a short jacket, because a long coat makes a Mobike awkward to ride.

【Be a Little Nicer to Yourself】A famous contemporary spending trap that, together with countless other excuses to buy — "live in the moment," "be your own queen," "buy early and enjoy it early, buy late and beg for it in tears," "regret it for three days if you buy, for three years if you don't," "don't grab it now and it'll cost a fortune later" — produces a certain kind of personal bankruptcy.

【Benchmark Upgrade Product】The purchase that maximizes the feeling that "my quality of life really is different now." Not all consumption upgrades are equal: going from a broom to an ordinary vacuum cleaner satisfies nowhere near as much as going from an ordinary vacuum cleaner to a Dyson. Other benchmark upgrade products include the Foreo cleansing brush, Bose speakers and Hansgrohe showerheads — a plain "can't reach the grapes, so call them sweet" habit of mind about upgrading.

【Air Bangs】The most easily chased fashion of the year: do it yourself at home and the popular look is yours! ... except it goes wrong easily — a day without washing your hair and it's a bird's nest; one gust of wind and you're instantly a wartime collaborator; overdo the styling and you're out of My Fair Princess. Which is why people spend 300 mornings a year in serious training for the perfect fringe: a fashion strictly for the leisure class.

【Canada Goose】Not everyone can afford one; the people who can wear it every day. Before they had it they wouldn't even wear long johns properly; once they have it they are bumping into the same jacket from early October to the end of March. An expensive romantic sentiment reserved for winter — the equivalent of a Northeasterner's mink.

【Greenery】Pantone, the color-forecasting outfit, has named Greenery (color code PANTONE 15-0343) the representative color of 2017. Given that last year's Serenity and Rose Quartz went on to appear on every major fashion item and fill the streets, we suggest that, to stay fashionable, you begin stockpiling matcha desserts, doubling the wasabi with your sashimi and wearing grass-green hats, so as to walk at the front of the times.

【Phenomenal Breakout Hit】An overblown pairing of words; every company's grand ambition; every practitioner's unreachable KPI. Since the phrase has been used to the point of devaluation, it now belongs only inside the grand ambitions.

【The Startup Analogy】A figure of speech for setting startup goals, using a giant from an unrelated industry as the benchmark. Startups line up to become the Starbucks of fitness, the Skype of e-invoicing, the Apple of car-wash O2O. A fox borrowing the tiger's might, across industries.

【Destiny】An overused reason for founding a company. Quite possibly modeled on the divine right of kings.

【The Second Half of the Internet】A term about time: the talk of the internet's next act, "the mobile internet era is over, this field will produce no more unicorns." The most worrying thing about it is what happens when this half ends — will "internet extra time" sound insufficiently dignified?

【Overtaking on the Curve】Every startup's grand ambition, with an unreliability index approaching "build a platform" and "redefine the industry."

【Rapid Iteration】That is, the thoughtful service of pushing users a more useless and less usable feature at the exact moment they have got used to the current one.

【Blue Ocean】A self-deceiving piece of startup confidence-trick vocabulary. You claim to have found a blue ocean and created new demand; in fact the water is quite possibly already blood-red, and more likely it is no ocean at all but a desert.

【Monetization】A corporate vision that wakes up only when the startup has reached the point where it cannot go on.

【Profit Model】Something founders and investors look for together. If the founder had found it long ago, the investor would have nothing to do.

【Fan Economy】The real-world version of the childhood daydream that "if every person in the world gave me one yuan, I'd have billions."

【The Middleman】A public enemy whom founders have cast as the Zhou Paopi of our day, the classic exploiting landlord. The hateful markup-extracting class that every industry wants to cut out.

【Rental Renovation / Old-House Renovation】A hot content category that, conservatively, has kept more than a dozen video companies and official accounts in business.

【It's All About Looks】The best line for explaining that "fashion is nonsense," with a bracing note of giving up on oneself.

【Shared-Bike Go】A real-world bike-hunting game. On the game map — the area around your housing compound or subway station — the player must capture a bike that the app says exists, that can actually be found, that nobody has reserved, and ride it away. At morning and evening rush hour the difficulty rises so high that a failed hunt feels like a small heartbreak dealt out by fate.

【Good Deed 2.0】That is, reporting on sight the shared bikes someone has hidden away for private use inside a housing compound. A good deed a day.

【Hoverboard Rider】That is, a leader in new forms of transport; the year's number-one poser.

【Pour-Over】A contemporary spiritual practice aimed at inner peace that mostly ends in failure: you spend a fortune on a full set of pour-over gear, follow the most precise technique and coffee-to-water ratio tutorials, and every cup still tastes different. That is life.

【The Workplace Muscle-Change Classic】A manual of inner power for the office that solves no actual problem and instead teaches you that whenever work goes wrong you should meditate, fast, send a signal to the universe and ask the water for answers.

【Cancer Prevention】The study of intelligence is a contested discipline, and to this day intelligence still has no clear definition. But daily life offers plenty of simple, easy-to-use props for testing an IQ. "Cancer prevention," paired with a quiz forwarded on Moments, is extremely accurate. Other such props: radiation protection, GMOs, scummy boyfriends.

【Midlife-Crisis-Cracking Syndrome】A new anxiety disorder brought on by hurrying to crack your midlife crisis, expressed as "I have to do something right now." Symptoms include planks in every spare minute, a sudden love of marathons, starting a company at the slightest provocation, and, when the company fails, retreating to cultivate immortality.

【Path-Less-Traveled Psychology】Psychological findings whose purpose is to contradict the existing ones. While most people discuss how not to be anxious, they publish Anxiety Is a Gift; while most people discuss how introversion affects a career, they publish Introversion Is a Form of Responsibility; while most people worry that social networks are damaging normal human contact, they publish Social Networks Make People Healthier. Impeccable methodology, crowd-pleasing conclusions: a magical sort of research result.

【NetEase Cloud Music Prose Style】A stream-of-consciousness literary form common in the top-voted comments on NetEase Cloud Music, with no connection whatsoever to the song. Standard format: "July 21, 2012, singing karaoke with Ergou. Later Ergou fell asleep. Later still, Ergou became someone else's dog. Today I heard this song again, and standing there with a dirty plate in my hands, I burst into tears once more." The feeling runs so deep you can't bring yourself to mention that the song actually came out in 2014.

【Video as a Side Dish】A habit of contemporary humans, governed by the principle that "eating without a show disrespects the food." But since deciding what to watch, and sitting through the ads on the wrong episode, takes long enough to eat three meals, the reality is closer to "ads as the side dish, video as the digestive."

【Chronic Cold Stomach】The recurring stomachache you get from not starting to eat until the food has gone cold, because "I hadn't found the video I wanted / the ad before the video I wanted hadn't finished / it hadn't buffered far enough to guarantee no stutter."

【Climate-Induced Myopia】On a smoggy day your eyesight is 500 degrees worse than on a clear one — "letting every Chinese person experience the soft focus of the short-sighted" — a universal romance.

【Squeeze Class】Economy-class seats on planes get narrower every year: an economical choice for the airline, a squeeze-class ordeal for the passenger.

【Dog】Animal of the year. Beyond the fixed phrases — overtime dog, single dog, startup dog — it also marks degree: frozen like a dog, poor as a dog, busy as a dog. Next year's animal may well be the horse; "ugly as a horse" is already in circulation.

Cover image by: Lin Xiaoyao

Illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao

"QDaily Dictionary" is a column of the QDaily Research Lab. Every week we use plain, accessible language to explain new and old concepts from daily life, to help you and us make sense of contemporary society, calmly.