From "Five Stresses and Four Points of Beauty" to "Guardian Girls": How Has Our Collective Vocabulary Changed in the Past Few Decades? | 100 Big Questions About Life
Collective vocabulary is a kind of cultural isotope: it marks the stages of a society's development, and our lives are woven into it.
Collective vocabulary is a kind of cultural isotope: it marks the stages of a society's development, and our lives are woven into it.
"Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: after a while, they take effect."
The line comes from the German scholar Victor Klemperer's The Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii, A Philologist's Notebook, where he also writes that "language brings to light what was meant to stay hidden." Language is the tool we use to make sense of the world and to speak for ourselves. It serves us, and it also gives away all sorts of details about the society each of us lives in. The part of language that shows the changing of an era most clearly is probably what we call buzzwords. How people in a given decade ate, dressed, lived and got around, the events of the day, the public mood — nearly all of it can be found in the buzzwords of the time.
In middle-school chemistry we all learned the word "isotope." Certain isotopes, carbon-14 for one, let us date a fossil. In Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, the writer John McPhee noticed something similar in language: some words work like carbon-14, and if you pick the right verbal "element," you strike a chord with the people of one particular era. His example: "If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise… you're letting Tom Cruise do some of your writing for you. Your description fails the moment a reader doesn't know who Tom Cruise is." That is more or less what we now mean by a buzzword.
McPhee turned the idea into a rough "carbon-14 vocabulary" test. He picked fifty or sixty items — names of people, places, titles of books and films — among them Woody Allen, Time magazine, Denver, Waterloo Bridge and Vivien Leigh. Then he asked 19 young students whether they knew each one, and scored the answers. About 15 percent of the items got a perfect score; nearly half got zero, recognized by nobody. He called this class of words "collective vocabulary," or "shared reference points." Put another way: the words people keep reaching for as a frame of reference tend to become the collective vocabulary of their time, and together they form the vast backdrop we call an era.
How Does "Collective Vocabulary" Turn Into a Language Time Machine?
You hear it all the time: "If you know what that is, you've just given away your age," or "I can't follow what you young people are saying." Both are vivid descriptions of buzzwords, of collective vocabulary. Listening to the words someone uses can sometimes place their age faster than looking at their face. Say you tell a friend, "Fei Xiang was my mom's generation's dream lover," or "my idol is one of the Kunyin Four." Then "Fei Xiang," "dream lover," "idol" and "the Kunyin Four" all count as collective vocabulary. What differs is how close each one feels to you: the first two are probably "not really — my mom mentioned them," the last two "oh, I know this one." So the four terms stand for two different stretches of time, the 1970s and 80s and the years after 2010; and if you are the one using them, you are most likely from the post-90s or post-00s generation.
Of course, how buzzwords change is itself a complicated business, and the way a word travels through a whole society can look nothing like the way it shows up in one person. Upbringing, schooling, line of work — all of it pulls each person's stock of words in a different direction. Collective vocabulary is only an approximate greatest common denominator; it can never truly mean "everyone from that era knows this, no exceptions." Meanwhile, as the internet has spread and social media has grown, some buzzwords have come roaring back online, and words from different periods now overlap, producing what you might call second-round popularity, or popularity running counterclockwise.
To find out how people's collective vocabulary has changed over the past few decades, the QDaily Research Lab recently ran its own version of the linguistic carbon dating described above.
We published a "word familiarity" questionnaire on a third-party site. It gathered common words from the 1960s through the past few years, covering daily life (household goods, brand advertising), entertainment (film, television and variety shows, public figures, books and games), society (colloquialisms, official institutions, national policy), the internet and more. As of October 30 we had heard back from 1,082 people. Almost all of them were 58 or younger — that is, born in the 1960s or later. The post-90s generation was the largest group, at 65 percent, followed by the post-70s at 12.3 percent.
Worth noting: McPhee never treated his own experiment as rigorous science. Both the words he asked about and the people he asked were whatever was at hand. The same limits apply to us. Of the 100 keywords in our questionnaire, some came out of our routine research (for instance, "Which everyday things your parents still use have all but disappeared from your own life?"); some came from books on the subject (Kuang Chen's Nostalgic Decades series, say); and a few came straight from the lives of the QDaily Research Lab's own editors. So both the number of words and the ground they cover are quite limited. For the sake of a clean survey, we also avoided words carrying more than one meaning, such as "comrade," and words that have been through a second life in pop culture, such as Meteor Garden.
Given all that, our results can hardly claim precision. But they do show some genuinely interesting trends — which is exactly what we were after. Even a small, informal round of questions, built out of one personal case after another, can give both the asker and the answerer that strange sensation McPhee describes: words "changing over time until they finally form a visible fault line in history."
Looking for Collective Vocabulary, We Turned Up a Few Small Discoveries
For every word, the questionnaire offered three answers: "never heard of it," "heard of it, but not familiar," and "know it well." Respondents fell into six groups, with these ages and shares of the total:
The last group was too small to count for now, so we left it out. The other five are our main subjects.
1. Which words are most likely to become our collective vocabulary?
We call the share of people who answered "know it well" the familiarity rate. The five words with the highest familiarity rate in each group are:
Seventeen words in all, mostly public figures, official institutions and household goods. In this survey they come closest to what we were looking for: collective vocabulary, or the buzzwords of an era.
2. Are there words that stay popular across several generations?
Yes — you can already see them in the words that repeat from group to group above.
We call the combined share of people who answered either "heard of it, but not familiar" or "know it well" the awareness rate. If the familiarity rate measures how deep a word's influence runs, the awareness rate estimates how far it spreads. The words in this survey that scored above 90 percent awareness in several age groups were:
3. Which words feel most tied to one generation?
We define generational specificity here as "plenty of people in one group know it, and people in the other groups have basically never heard of it" — what we usually mean by "you had to live through it to get it." Nearly every word in the survey carries some of this, to one degree or another. The ones with the sharpest time gaps include:
But note that "tied to one generation" does not mean "people from other eras have no idea." While we were doing this research, a reader named @Liu Yiran handed us a nice counterexample. Our list included "buladzhi," a transliteration of the Russian платье, which turns up in the 2009 television series Golden Marriage; it means a short-sleeved or sleeveless dress. The word was popular from the founding of the People's Republic through the 1960s, and even among respondents born in the 1960s nearly half chose "never heard of it." Yet this reader, a post-90s respondent from Harbin, told us he knows it well. Which shows that time is only a simplified variable: pulled this way and that by social forces, a word can vanish on a large scale and survive on a small one at the same time.
4. Is collective vocabulary shrinking?
Another question worth sitting with. As time passes and ways of living multiply, new words keep appearing, and old ones are either kept or replaced. On the whole, though, is collective vocabulary growing or shrinking?
McPhee's own view is that it has been shrinking for centuries, and that the shrinkage is speeding up. He never spelled out his reasoning, so for now we read him this way: the collective vocabulary that emerges these days tends to belong to niches and cliques rather than to everybody, so the stock of words that truly earn the word "collective" does look like it is thinning out.
The claim is hard to test. Judging only by our survey, the "new words" from after 2000, set against the "old words" from before 1980, do not seem to be confined to the young:
It appears that people born in the 1960s know a fair number of the post-00s generation's new words. Within the bounds of our survey, at least, there is no obvious downward trend in the amount of collective vocabulary. If anything, new words are breaking through the wall — breaking out of their circle — and reaching the older generation more often than before.
5. So which collective vocabulary has broken through?
The old words known to the most post-00s respondents, and the new words known to the most post-60s respondents, are:
On the subject of words crossing generations, you might also look at another of our surveys, "What 'battle language' have you seen, or used without thinking?" The gaokao pep rallies we all sat through at school, and the phrases we used to steel ourselves — "an all-out decisive battle," "fight this hard battle well," "storm the fortress" — mostly date from before the reform era, leftovers of a historical collective vocabulary. Young people know them as well as they know any new word.
6. Has collective vocabulary's lifespan grown shorter?
The gut feeling is yes: set online buzzwords against the everyday speech we use offline, and the former clearly turns over much faster. We once ran a poll, "When does it hit you that the internet's memory lasts only seven seconds?", in which "online buzzwords get swapped out for a new batch every few months" came second. Last December, the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center for Network Media at Central China Normal University published its list of the "Top Ten Internet Expressions of 2017": "da call" (cheering someone on), "awkward chat," "doesn't your conscience hurt?", "surprised? shocked?", "mantis shrimp, let's go," "that stings, buddy," "is that even a thing?", "dui" (to call someone out), "you got freestyle?" and "greasy." Of those ten, only about half are still used exactly as they were. The rest have been filed under "past it" or "needs a slight update or it looks dated." Which is to say that their two-year survival rate may be under 50 percent — Moore's Law for words.
But turn it around. First, internet buzzwords are not the same thing as buzzwords in general; collective vocabularies come in different sizes, and internet users are only one collective among many. Second, "no longer used" does not mean "forgotten." Take that top-ten list: you may never again type "you got freestyle?" or "mantis shrimp, let's go" into a chat window, yet you know exactly what they mean and how they work. So neither trending online nor still being in use is a precondition for becoming collective vocabulary.
We lined up the 100 words from the questionnaire by the year they appeared. Here is their awareness rate across the different groups of respondents:
Each generation knows best the words that appeared ten to twenty years after it was born. Outside that window, the further a word's age sits from a person's own, the lower its awareness rate. But judging by how gradually the awareness rate falls off, words from the past thirty years are not disappearing any faster than words from the thirty years before that.
This is a rough observation, of course, and for a living language a span of under sixty years is not long. Perhaps we will have to wait another thirty to find out how much of today's collective vocabulary survives.
7. Will the internet language of this era become a collective vocabulary of its own?
Going by our earlier surveys — on fandom terminology, on the new etiquette of chatting online, on startup jargon — online words generally fall into three groups:
- Words no longer in use. The most common are probably the slang of BBS forums, blogs and QQ Zone, nearly all of it gone as each new generation of social media took over: "knitting a scarf" (a pun on posting to Weibo), "stepping through someone's Zone," "mottled bamboo" (a pun on "moderator"), "canola flower" (a pun on "so talented"). The other kind is keywords born of news events, homophone jokes and abbreviations, which carry an obvious expiry date — everywhere for a stretch, then unable to hold anyone's attention for long: "deeply moved, then said no," "blue thin mushroom" (a mangled "feeling awful, want to cry"), "SARS."
- Words still active today. Some are new technologies and products, like "AI" or "robot vacuum." Some are the in-house jargon of one circle, like "UP-zhu" (an uploader on Bilibili) or "yingyuan" (fan support). Some, thanks to an unusual style or meaning, filled a gap in the ways we already had of saying things and moved formally into our everyday stock: "internet celebrity," "jiong" (a character shaped like a glum face), "moe." Some are elastic enough to be stretched in any direction: "mysterious so-and-so," "sure, that's very whatever." And some are old words that found new work — "sofa," the call for the first comment slot, which started on blogs and forums and is now busy in the comment sections of WeChat official accounts.
- Words that went quiet and then came back. Mostly used as period jokes, more for teasing than anything else, with no new meaning attached: "so you surf the internet too?", "886."
As we said earlier, the internet's arrival has quickly enriched collective vocabulary in the broad sense, while adding uncertainty to how these words are born and how they travel. Call it a bubble in words if you like. But who can promise that the next fifty-year word will not come out of it?
Those are our main findings about collective vocabulary. The linguist Guy Deutscher writes in Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages that language is not a flat mirror but a lens: it changes how people see the world.
Seen that way, "you are what you say" takes on a new meaning. We choose some words and absorb others without noticing, and those words in turn shape us. In short, it is countless scraps of speech like these that make up the whole shape of contemporary life.
Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.