The thing about words....

One of the repeating themes you'll find in this blog is about the power of words. Or, more accurately, the power we give to words. We sort of know, deep down, that they are just words - but then life happens and our thinking energises them again, breathes life into them and tags them as positive, negative, neutral, triggering, rude, inappropriate or whatever.

Social media, firmly supported by advertising and the enshittification of the internet (more on that subject soon), has really changed the landscape of how words get empowered, particularly in the younger generation. The process seems to be something like this:

⭐ A 'digital creator' thinks up some random sh1t in the hope that it will go viral and posts it on one or more of their social platforms .

⭐ They're in luck and their followers love it and share it. It becomes a meme !

⭐ The platforms see that it is trending and push it to a much wider audience (with a shedload of advertising wrapped around it).

⭐ The expressions start to get used in schools and after a short time of the teachers and parents thinking 'what the flip are they on about' they track down the source and it becomes a thing.

This process of memeification (which is an actual word now !!!!) takes words and expressions and hijacks them for the purposes of the meme. But because of the power of internet advertising it happens super fast.

Taking back ownership

At the time of writing I am 61 years old and I confess I could probably keep up with the younger generation on this, but I don't want to. I still don't know what skibidi toilet was about and why my grandson loved it. I just watched S28:E1 of South Park (Twisted Christian) and have no clue as to what this 6-7 Meme (it has it's own wikipedia page !) is about and why 'Tech Bro' Peter Theil is trying to do an exorcism on Cartman to cure him of the 6-7 thing.

What I do worry (and when I say worry it's a 0.5 on the richter scale of worry) about is that a memeified phrase can mean different things to different generations and that can make cross generational communication more difficult. This post is about taking back ownership of a phrase that has gone downhill in recent years and has become a term of hopeless acceptance, when it is so much more than that. I want to get the phrase 'it is what it is' back to where it should be - a recognition of the power of living in the moment.