When I saw some WeChat or text messages for New Year's greetings in the Year of the Dragon, I suddenly felt that I was illiterate. For example, I wish you a prosperous future, a bright life, and a bright career in the new year!
If someone occasionally jokingly uses these traditional characters to liven up, it is also a bit new, after all, SMS WeChat New Year's greetings have become less and less recognized. But these words, which are not known to most people, have become the hottest blessings for the New Year of the Dragon, and have caused some people to talk about and praise them, thinking that they have been asked by the university, discovered the New World, and dug up a big gold mine, which is really an abnormal phenomenon!
In real life, there are always people who are not good at speaking and writing, pretending to be profound, using some special words or expressions, pursuing the effect of making the audience fall into the clouds, flashy, sensational, and pretending to attract the attention or awe of others.
It is true that the traditional culture is broad and profound, as the carrier of language, Chinese characters are cultural symbols that carry the historical memory of the nation, every stroke has been exquisite, there are words, Chinese characters have been integrated into the blood and temperament of our nation, and have become an important tool for us to know the past, understand the tradition, touch the present, and look forward to the future, which should be inherited.
However, inheritance is not the same as copying. Should Ru Mao drink blood be inherited? Should drilling wood for fire be passed on? It should be noted that since the emergence of Chinese characters, it has gone through a long process of development. There are too many Chinese characters due to various reasons, and the use of reading and writing often wastes a lot of people's time and energy, and it is easy for people to fall into poverty, chew on words, and wear and chisel, which consumes people's creativity and imagination and increases social costs. For a nation that values literature over reason, this phenomenon should be abandoned.
For this reason, Chinese characters have gone through a process from complex to simplified. The simplification of Chinese characters has long been proposed by people of insight, especially in modern times, and many intellectuals have put forward suggestions for the use of simplified characters. Lu Xun even said radically: "If Chinese characters do not perish, China will perish." Although this statement is a bit excessive at first glance, it has a certain significance in promoting the consistency of written and spoken language.
In the same month after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the state established the Chinese Character Reform Association. One of the main tasks of the association is the simplification of Chinese characters. Beginning in 1956, after nearly ten years and a lot of manpower and resources, the "General List of Simplified Characters" was finally approved in May 1964. The state has also made great efforts to popularize and popularize simplified characters and use them to this day, forming habits and norms. With the exception of some special needs such as calligraphy, simplified characters are mostly used. If traditional characters come back, it will undoubtedly be a regression of a language.
The greatest function of writing should be to convey effective information, and to use popular and popular words as much as possible. Even if fresh words or expressions are used to meet the needs of language beauty, we should not be too new and curious, and the form should be more important than the content. For some traditional rare characters, they can neither be artificially eliminated, nor should they be deliberately pursued. If you deliberately use some uncommon, infrequently used or even musty rare words to show off or even pretend to be forced, you can only win a laugh. If everyone imitates it, it will expose the blind obedience, shallowness, low-grade taste and boredom of culture, and only bring words and spiritual pollution to the public.
The text must be popular before it can be spread far, and the language must be about the heart. We should advocate the use of concise words, vivid brushstrokes, and deep emotions to express New Year's greetings and blessings, and reduce some esoteric and mysterious cold words, clichés, and empty words, so that it is possible to penetrate into the hearts of the other party and receive the effect of blessings.
In the article** from Visual China).