I haven’t been doing it. Social media. I do scroll around though. What am I looking for? Either way I get slapped across the face repeatedly with certain turns of phrase; eventually I grow familiar with them–at least in the fact that they are popular, and how they are used. This is a breakdown of a few, in case you wondered what was seething behind the silence of my (and here we have the first pop term I’ll discuss) “ghosting.”
- Ghosting. So, not participating but observing; apparently that’s haunting behavior to the most of you. Makes sense because it’s not the social norm, which instead seems to be: taking a stand on one definitively and utterly canonized side of a thing with such enthusiasm that your typed words are somehow damaging to my eardrums and upsetting to my stomach.
- Fight Me. A regrettably figurative offer.
- You Good, Bro? Expounded for analysis to, “Are you doing all right, Brother?” Originally, there might have been a vague concern for someone’s mental and emotional well-being behind the phrase. It seems to me it should be used just that way–a manner of looking out for someone, offering a chance to share what’s happening internally. Instead it’s a slight; a violent act of alienation: “You have stepped outside the lines while the rest of us here are working comfortably within them; what’s wrong with you?” It’s school yard shit; pure fuckwaddery.
- You Do You. As above, could seem like an affirmation of the other–a means of offering support for individuality: a “Free to be you and me” statement of fewer characters. Instead it’s just the opposite: “I think you’re fucking up, but go ahead, I don’t care, or won’t until I get to say ‘I told you so.'” Unless this is a misspelling. It could be a misspelled hashtag in favor of less stringent/judgmental societal terms regarding relations between men and farm animals: “You do Ewe.”
While it might not seem this way to you, I’m only dissecting these beloved devices of yours because I care. Do you want to live in a world endlessly marred by catch phrases designed to perpetuate infighting between subdivided subdivisions of our microcosmically splintered cultural divide? Or would you rather work against the very machine probably responsible for all this infighting–toward a common goal; like say a man’s right to express love outside the boundary of his own species.
Wherever your stand on the role of pop language in the world’s troubles today, my message is the same: I encourage you to feel free to get away from that computer screen, head out to pasture and fuck yourself a sheep.
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