if you’ve arrived here expecting any kind of cultural analysis, i’m afraid you are chapping at the wrong door. this is just a good old-fashioned rant about social media.
you know the way everyone on tiktok repeatedly recycles the exact same phrases in comments? phrases like ‘have the day you deserve,’ ‘no❤️,’ ‘hope this helps,’ ‘put the fries in the bag,’ ‘oh, that’s not—’ the list goes on and on and on and grows maybe weekly.
the lifecycle of such a phrase goes something like this: someone, at some point, must be the first to commit a particular phrase to comment. it might be a reference to something else, it might be a sarcastic twist on a usually sincere phrase, it might be a general witticism. whatever it is, it is clever and funny. someone else sees this comment and also thinks it’s clever and funny. they decide to employ the same phrase in a comment under another video. this happens thousands of times over until you open the comments on a viral video and virtually every comment is using that same phrase. and, under any comment that isn’t using the phrase, you will be sure to find the phrase in the replies, probably multiple times from multiple different users. this lasts for a week or so until something else becomes the phrase du jour and the cycle repeats with the new phrase.
i’ll illustrate this with real examples.
1
under a video of a guy talking to camera (content not relevant), hundreds—hundreds—of users signal that they don’t care about what this guy has to say, not by scrolling past, but by commenting ‘put the fries in the bag.’
2
under a video of a girl talking about Chappell Roan and her relationship with celebrity and her fans, the following conversation:
userA she’s just not cut out for fame
userB no. hope this helps!
userA she wanted the fame and now she’s changed her mind too late
userB that’s not what fame means. hope this helps
userA im just saying she knew what she was getting into
userB she shouldn’t have to expect this kind of behaviour from fans. hope this helps
even when I agree with the commenter’s point, as soon as I see the sarcastic ‘hope this helps!’ deployed, it does my nut in equally. like, say anything else!!!
things that were funny and original at first are rendered toothless through repetition. how can you think you are saying something clever and funny when you’re just copying exactly what someone else has said a million times? and you know everyone else knows you’re recycling other people’s wording. because twenty other people have already written the exact same comment in the exact same comment section.
I suppose there’s an argument for ‘that’s what a meme is,’ but 1. doesn’t mean it can’t annoy me; 2. doesn’t mean it’s achieving the desired effect; 3. what’s the point in using the exact same meme phrase directly underneath twenty other people who got there before you?! you’re too late, go and comment it somewhere else at least!
back when ‘mid’ was the trendy thing for teenage boys to comment on photos/videos of attractive women, ‘mid’ practically stopped being an insult altogether through overuse. no one hurling the insult ‘mid’ at a woman had looked at her, evaluated her appearance and then decided she was so bland, boring and unremarkable that they were compelled to comment ‘mid.’ instead, they saw a woman, wanted to insult her, and used the one insult in their arsenal they knew was pre-approved and sure to garner likes from the rest of the ‘mid’ crowd. easy way to get attention and a self esteem boost. but not a good way to insult someone. because the person you are insulting has also seen ‘mid’ tossed around willy nilly in the comments of countless other women. she knows this isn’t an insult thought of specially for her based on anything about her. and so it doesn’t sting in the way a specific and considered nasty insult does.
personally, if someone called me ‘mid’ it would do nothing to me. if someone said to me ‘your eyebrows are too unkempt and it’s weird that your ears move when you smile’ on the other hand—now we’re getting somewhere.
this doesn’t apply only to ‘mid.’ lifting wholesale from a million other comments, without tailoring to the specific person or situation, makes any insult or snarky comment less cutting than it was at its conception. the more it’s used, the more it loses its grit.
which brings me to ‘i’m going to hold your hand when I say this…’
like with any overused meme phrase, I thought this was clever the first time I read it. it was a concise way to signal tone in text format. it communicated something along the lines of, ‘when you read my next statement, imagine I am holding your hand, because I am delivering this message with compassion, and because I care about you.’
sometimes it was used gently, like under a video of a woman sharing details about ways her boyfriend behaves as if he doesn’t care about her, people would say, ‘i’m going to hold your hand when I say this, he doesn’t care about you/you should break up with him/etc.’ sometimes it was more like, ‘i’m going to hold your hand when I say this, that hair colour doesn’t suit you.’ it was soon whittled down to just ‘i’m going to hold your hand when I say this…’ sufficient as a comment on its own, to imply in a snarky way that the commenter disagreed with whatever the original poster was saying, or that there was something about the original poster’s appearance that the commenter didn’t like.
back when this was the phrase du jour (this one got to be the phrase du six jours or so) about a fortnight ago, I saw a video of a major tiktok nurse talking about being pro choice and the realities of what abortion is, i.e. not some ‘slut’ using it as ‘birth control’ but a wide umbrella of medical procedures and medical events, including miscarriage.
she repeated, ‘i’m going to hold your hand when I say this’—the then-current buzz term—over and over and over again after every point. like after every sentence. I liked the content of the video. I agreed with the content of the video. I think the content of the video was useful and important information. but jesus christ, it was irritating.
and I know exactly what she meant when she was saying it. she was trying to convey that she was saying what she was saying kindly and gently to people who had misconceptions about what she was talking about. so say that!!! say ‘I mean this kindly and gently’ or, idk, anything else. maybe vary it every other sentence.
not only is the phrase not the most effective way to communicate to your audience (because you’re not actually going to hold my hand, you’re in my phone, and me understanding what you’re trying to convey relies on me understanding the intent behind the phrase and maybe how it’s been used online the last few days specifically while understanding that it’s not being used in the sarcastic sense it evolved into), it’s not emotionally resonant because you’re just repeating the most applicable current tiktok phrase instead of using the language that most accurately conveys what you want to say with real emotion from your actual mind.
yes I do feel better now, thank you for asking. maybe this is a bit ‘old man yells at cloud’ of me (although not really because there are people much older than me doing it. loads of them!!). i’m very aware that absolutely none of this matters. it’s truly, truly just a pet peeve of mine. but also…
use your own brain!!! say what you mean!!!
(it’s my substack and i’ll rant if I want to)
This is yet another thing on Substack that I'm glad someone else has written, because now I get the catharsis without the work and also I get to rest assured that other people are thinking these things so the responsibility of writing them does not fall solely on my shoulders
it also infuriates me because a lot of times it’s non-Black people run AAVE down to the ground and then people think reduce it by calling it "gen z slang". for example, if you know anything about Gabbie Hanna and her recent youtube apology, she would say “lick back” over and over in essentially the exact opposite way it’s meant to be used. and this is what bothers me about TikTok is that people take our AAVE and turn it into nonsense that then gets laughed at by everyone who doesn’t even know its origin. another example is “gyatt” which completely lost its meaning when it became widespread.
that's not the only way in which tiktok annoys me. lilke you mentioned there are some phrases that aren't originated in AAVE, but are also run down to the ground.