META: In Defense of Feels

[mithen]

I've seen, in a variety of places, decrying of what's sometimes called "Tumblr-speak," especially targeted toward the term "feels." "You should just say you feel something, not this ridiculous 'I have feels' thing," the argument goes. But today I wish to step up to the plate and give a light-hearted defense of "feels" for a moment--bear with me!





My main argument is that "feels" are actually qualitatively different from "feelings," and "having feels" is different from "having feelings" or "feeling something." "Feels" is actually a perfectly cromulent very useful word that describes a quite different emotional experience than "feeling" something. Specifically, feels are on the whole reserved for feelings related to the experience of fannish pleasure--in my experience, with an overtone of "a subset of extremely intense feelings that we all understand are linked to a fictional artifact." I've never heard anyone say something like "I had a lot of feels at my grandfather's funeral"--"feels" are reserved for Phil Coulson or the Doctor. I do see it used sometimes for a similar thing--emotions that are understood as fleeting but still crushingly intense while experienced--but on the whole it's used most often to discuss reactions to people and things not part of our day-to-day lives (Katara, Robert Downey Jr.).



"Feels" is a handy shorthand that serves to delineate a specific kind of emotional experience: one marked by intensity and purity that transcends "day to day" emotions of happiness and sorrow (with their often-muddied, contradictory undertones).



It's also a tongue-in-cheek way to downplay those emotions, to ironically distance yourself from them a little bit and make clear you don't take them that seriously. They're not feelings, they're feels. It's actually an incredibly useful and complex term, one that serves to mark a very specific kind of experience and to simultaneously elevate and disparage it. Feels are overwhelming, they blot out everything in a rush of emotion, either good or bad.



Feels are something to be savored and--at a certain level--enjoyed, even when they're negative. Sad feelings are awful; but watching something that gives you sad feels has a certain hyper-real pleasure to it (obviously, or certain creators wouldn't have such huge followings!)



The term is, far from being a corruption of the language, an elegantly precise word that serves a very useful function. So next time you feel reluctant to say something "hit you right in the feels" or to cry out "ow, my feels!" embrace your inner fan, let go of your inner grammarian, and go for it!

And with that, I humbly take my leave of you. Thank you for your consideration! Perhaps next year I shall try to parse and defend "I have lost my ability to can."

Comments

[alltoseek]

tumblr post for you: http://netherworldvineyard.tumblr.com/post/50972242664/bigplanssforthatfish-reblogallthenerdythings

though it has a million notes so you've prolly seen it

WHAT IS UR TUMBLR???!!!

Also for some reason on my dash I see the whole thing but when I try to opne just the post it won't show the rest of the commentary, which goes like this:

no listen this is actually really amazing because this is a real thing. i think this counts as a pidgin language. a pidgin language is basically a changed, simplified version of a language. you can change the spellings of words, pronunciation, grammar rules, or even make up new words. i think. i’d have to research it a bit more to be sure but i’m 90% sure this is right. if its not a pidgin language, then its a lingua franca but thats more used for trade and stuff like that. but still a new language. so yes, we’ve created our own language. we’ve changed the whole sentence structure. we can trail off sentences, say things like “i just cant”, and use words like ship, OTP, fic, fandom, feels, and ship names and everyone will understand what you’re saying. the part that i love most is how people go “OMGH IM CRIIY NIG SOIOO HARD” and understand each other. for example “IM LIUA GHMNIG”. that one was incredibly easy, but if you knew that said “I’m laughing”, congratulations. You speak a pidgin language. we can even say stuff like “Does anyone know of a Johnlock fic, at least 20k words, not a WIP, with no OCs, and is Post-Reichenbach? Or just a Destiel PWP would be great.” To someone not on tumblr, that wouldn’t make any sense. but you understood, didn’t you? One characteristic of a pidgin language is that you have to learn it like a second language. Another characteristic is that it is frequently changing. tumblr goes through many trends with how we talk. if i remember correctly, when i first made an account about two years ago, talking like this wasn’t quite as common. also, that thing of suddenly capitalizing your sentence is fairly recent. you know, when people go “the new epISODE IS TOMORROW”. Like one of the people up there said, all of this is awesome because how else do you easily show emotion and tone over the internet? we’ve even made a whole sense of humour that most people here share in. There’s so much more that I could talk about with this, but i’m tired and i may be entirely wrong about everything. but yes. people on the fandom side of tumblr who speak like this are speaking a new language

[mithen]

OMG this is flawless i cAN'T EVEN. It is a pidgin or lingua franca, isn't it? And it's beautiful in its own weird mutated way...

[franzeska]

Nah, it's not actually a pidgin because it's not a trade language developed between groups that lack a common language (no matter how many EFL/ESL speakers there are in English language fandom). Tumblrspeak also lacks a bunch of the common grammatical/phonological features of pidgins, but that's less telling than the lack of the required linguistic situation. I'd say it operates more like other subculture slangs, which are also prone to messing with grammar, borrowing words, making up new meanings for existing ones, etc.

[mithen]

Lingua Franca slang (Slangua Franca?) might be a better term then--it would be fun to compare it to something like Thieves' Cant as a way to identify members of one's subculture. :)