Eudaly
In recent years, if any group has made the greatest "contribution" to Chinese, it is definitely not a professor in the Chinese Department of a university, nor a group of novelists, but the vast number of netizens.
From "Olga" to "Juejue Zi", from "Dog Ba" to "Beating Hemp", the people have greatly expanded the breadth and depth of Chinese with their unparalleled abstract construction ability, and can be called real "language masters".
These corpora, which are beyond the scope of linguists' research, are expanding at a speed visible to the naked eye. Masters have recently added a new word to this corpus: cow and horse.
If "Juejuezi" can easily be defined as an adverb of degree indicating reinforcement, the connotation of "Niuma" is obviously more complicated and obscure.
Source: Chicken Dictionary
People who are new to this word often need a lot of examples to help understand why everyone can be a "cow and horse".
When playing games, my teammates are so bad that they can be called "cows and horses".
Here, "ox and horse" is generally a derogatory term.
Good friends around you can also be called "cattle and horses".
Here, "ox and horse" is generally a noun, which is biased towards praise.
There are even people who call themselves "cows and horses".
Life is not smooth, that is the life of cattle and horses; If the major is not good, it is the major of cattle and horses.
Here, "ox and horse" is generally a negative adjective.
When a paragraph begins with "what kind of cow or horse", it is probably an modal particle.
If you are willing to translate it into "whatsthehell/f * * k?" That "ox and horse" is an appositive of "what"
But when the word "ox and horse" is applied to specific sentences, its meaning often becomes ambiguous again. For example, the following example.
I understand, but I don't fully understand.
1000 population has 1000 "cattle and horses".
In addition to semantic ambiguity, the origin of the word ox and horse has also become a mystery with different opinions.
Some people say that it is the Lickitung pronunciation of "hooligans", but I believe that the proportion of people with dysphonia in China should not be too high.
Others insist that this statement comes from the northeast dialect, but this inaccurate, map-cannon explanation can easily lead to anger.
So far, the only thing that can be done on this issue is that the popularity of "Niu Ma" began with some short video platforms, accompanied by earthy love stories and brainwashing music, which spread from the online world to the real space.
Unfortunately, it may be a platform for the spread of "cattle and horses", but it is not the real birthplace of "cattle and horses".
When people use the new network word "ox and horse", they often ignore the fact that a vivid language cannot be separated from the local people and people.
The word "ox and horse" is different from those coined by the Internet, and it has never disappeared among the people in China.
At least in the period of the Republic of China, "ox and horse" has been a conventional saying.
At that time, those rickshaw drivers who were full of energy, leaning on one foot and coming and going in the wind and rain were called "cattle and horses" or "cattle and horses go".
Xiangzi camel belongs to pure cattle and horses.
This title was soon applied to other bottom-level workers, but all industries with low wages and high labor intensity can basically be called "cattle and horses"
Women textile workers who work 15 hours a day are all cattle and horses.
Teachers who don't have enough food and want to "cover their stomachs with one hand and write books on the blackboard with the other" are all cows and horses.
"Cattle and horses" are used so much that even ordinary people who live in poverty and have poor prospects often call themselves cattle and horses.
According to the memoirs of Taiwan Province writer Wang Dingjun,
Some Kuomintang officers who were abolished after the Anti-Japanese War stood begging on the streets of Shenyang and cursed the graduation certificate of Huangpu Military Academy as a "certificate of cattle and horses".
Memoirs of Wang Dingjun
Guanshanduo road
Later, even students who didn't produce began to call themselves cows and horses. "I want to serve the society, but because I am in this depressed year, it is more difficult to find a job than a camel passing through the eye of a needle." Students who are unemployed after graduation and have no hope of life write articles mocking their campus life.
In addition to the bottom workers, ordinary citizens and intellectuals at that time also felt that they were not much better than physical strength. Chongqing in the period of "supporting the capital" is a typical example.
Zhang Henshui accurately described this group of people in the book "Cattle and Horses Walk":
Although he is an educated man, in order to maintain basic food and clothing, he has to work as hard as a rickshaw puller, and his future is even bleaker than that of a rickshaw puller. Coaches only pull people for a short distance, but they have to pull the boss for life; Drivers can see their way, but they can't. I have to spend money myself, and some people ask them for money. It is completely "double cattle and horses."
He also wrote about the Golden Powder Family.
Of course, the "cattle and horses" at that time were not completely linked to poverty.
Intellectuals think of themselves as "cattle and horses", but they think that rich women and speculators who are obsessed with money and busy playing mahjong every day are also "a group of cattle and horses in Chongqing"
Some people will say that this is the old calendar of the old society. How do young people in the new world begin to say hello with "cows and horses" now?
"Two-legged bookcase" may say that this is another misuse and pollution of language by Internet culture.
That's what the vernacular movement said a hundred years ago, and it was wrong a hundred years ago.
It is normal for mainstream young people to be confused about the origin of "cattle and horses". Even some friends who read the article heard the word "ox and horse" for the first time, because this word full of Jianghu flavor originally came from another world with no * * * voice and intersection with them.
"Cattle and horses", a word in the old society, has been living in the gap that mainstream civilization can't reach, and it is the mantra and common code of individual social people.
It is popular again in the new world and has been endowed with richer connotations. It's just a bottom-up spread, another form of rural encircling cities.
All kinds of "social people" have brought the "social addiction" that young people have never talked about to a brand-new communication platform.
Inadvertently said "cattle and horses", poked the young people from all walks of life's exuberant curiosity, and also let them find the * * * Song.
Just like blacks say hommie, women say sisters, revolutionaries say comrades, and young people at the bottom call each other cattle and horses the identity of this new era.
But from "grassroots" to "_ diaosi" and then to "cattle and horses", if you think about it carefully, you will find that as an identity code, it is not just the name that changes.
The grassroots in the blog era may sprout and grow, and the diaosi in the post-era is just the self-mockery of the little people under the huge gap.
Today, young people who should be the target of all cultural forces are also rapidly stratified like the world they live in.
Young people call themselves problem writers, young people call themselves social people, young people watch Heidegger and young people watch short videos.
The "great expectations" described by the old habits have produced endless free fantasy in the minds of young people at the bottom, which has aroused waves of enthusiasm for changing their own destiny. But when the big stick of reality hits them, they not only accept mediocrity, but even choose to love mediocrity again.
Book wisdom is no longer popular, street wisdom is popular, young people naturally follow suit, and even self-address is gradually sinking. The phrase "ox and horse" has a certain meaning of rancid hooligans.
This is the real "numbness".
WeareallNiuma
In fact, from grass roots, diaosi to cattle and horses, some things have never changed, that is, calling "we" behind our backs.
From "I used to be an ox and horse, but now I want to be a man" to "I used to be an individual, but now I want to be an ox and horse", it seems to be the self-mockery and ridicule of young people who are at a loss, but it can't hide the desire of a group of people to exchange labor for income; Eager to cross a narrow door and lead to a broad world; Eager for grassroots counterattack, cattle and horses turned over.
After all, even if everyone calls themselves "cows and horses", no one really wants to be cows and horses.
And if they can realize the power of words, they may have to start by not saying "ox and horse".