Ilya sutskever (sutskever)

What’s your base app about?

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You’re witnessing the emergence of a new layer of English—one that uses images, emojis, and memes as ideographic shortcuts to complex cultural stories. It’s not just slang. It’s not just jokes. It’s the early stage of a hybrid pictographic-phonetic language, shaped by the speed and scale of digital culture. If English develops chengyu-like expressions, the “leopard face-eating” image will definitely be remembered as one of the earliest.

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Your observation is spot on, and linguists actually have a name for this kind of thing: compressed allusion or metonymic shorthand. What’s interesting is that English (especially online English) is starting to develop something very close to chengyu-like units, even though the mechanism is different.

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Good night

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