'This.' sucks: why you need to stop using the internet's worst one-word sentence
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Version 0 of 1. This. is the buzziest social media site. No, not this. This.cm is a platform in which users can only share a single link a day, in an attempt to still the white noise of information overload. This misses the point of the internet, which is the exponential proliferation of ideas, and pithy clips of cats being bastards. But I was struck by the name, which references a piece of internet slang that is uniquely annoying and sinister, like someone wearing a balaclava at a buffet. What is it about online speech that can be so irritating? I’m not glad you asked. Writing about slang is thankless and futile and slides into irrelevancy faster than tea cools. In the meme-age, it shapeshifts like a chameleon on mephedrone. In gaming communities, slang breeds in its own microbial culture, spawning rapidly, mutating, and dying unobserved to the outer world. But some slang sticks around long enough, or gets big enough, that we actually notice it, even if we don’t understand it. It invariably sparks a lot of anger, despair, and the wailing certainty that English has died, young people now communicate by drawing on each other in virtual crayons, and in 30 years will all be speaking in some kind of bastard binary. Maybe that’s true. There are certainly some eye-watering examples of online idiocy around, the most brazen of which are acronyms. Acronyms are the holiday reps of internet speak, grinding on you in hotpants, offering you neon drinks, making you feel old. STBY! they holler in your face, but DILLIGAS! Is it possible to stay abreast of internet acronyms? QTWTAIN. (In point of linguistic technicality, most of the above are not actually acronyms, because they’re not pronou- SORRY, TL;DR.) We don’t like acronyms because they’re abstruse and exclusive, which is kinda the deal with slang, daddy-o. Frantically looking them up on Urban Dictionary is as useless as picking up sex tips from magazines - you’re never going to use them properly. Then there are once amusing phrases staled by repetition, and by repetition I mean the second time you hear them. I lol’d out loud the first time I saw roflcopter, lollerskates, the use of *tips fedora* as a gesture of respect. I love playfulness in language – the creative misspellings, idiot pronunciation and syntax of lolcats, homestar runner and doge still tickle me silly. Even amazeballs – I am giving you amazeballs, you cannot say fairer than that – might have earned a grudging smirk once, and once only. Where there once was creativity, however, there is now herd-lol. One-dimensional jokes can only be stretched one way, which is too thin. But there’s a more insidiously irritating species of internet phraseology. It’s easy to understand, and not trying to be funny. It’s the type of template-attitude adopted by people who really dig themselves. Take a phrase like “X is my new jam”. X is my new jam is – or since I’m writing about it here, was – a breezy way of sharing music on social media. While it literally means “this is what I’m listening to”, it aspires to be a white guy with dreadlocks, tossing you a CD as he rolls by on a longboard. In other words, it deserves a dry slap. Its remit also broadens, to the point that anything can be your new jam, whether it’s a walking tour of the Imperial War Museum, or marmalade. The open ended “I can’t even” is an affectation of incomprehension that you cannot process or respond to what you have just read or seen, because it is a new paradigm of stupidity/sexiness/goats singing Taylor Swift. It’s not ineffective, but it is lazy – when we jump to responsive end-points like this, discussion shuts down. (Similarly I don’t like “Just sayin,” because it implies the user is a sassy straight-talker, who settles issues in a way no one else can manage, or speak beyond.) But for my money, the worst is ‘This.’ Always with the capital T, and full stop, to imply conversation begins and ends with whatever I am about to show you. Sometimes you get it in all caps, another indicator you are not in a conversational realm. ‘This.’ aims for a lapidary quality, as if the endorsement should be carved in stone tablets and broken over your head. It might be a vine of Ryan Gosling feeding a rabbit, or a newsreader accidentally saying ‘boner’. It doesn’t matter. Prepare for the summum bonum (heh, bonum) of entertainment. Perhaps it’s only ‘This.’ for the sharer, but it has the monumental weight of a black obelisk, demanding your attention. It doesn’t give you details, or choice. There is threat in it. Whoever writes ‘This.’ has given themselves the sanction to do so, and you must follow. Only despots quash subjectivity, pretending there are no these, only this. Don’t do that. |