In May 2012, Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary and the McCann Advertising Agency gathered a group of language experts to name a phenomenon common in the age of the smartphone. They called the phenomenon “phubbing”, and defined(定义)it as “the act of snubbing(无视)someone in a social setting by looking at your phone instead of paying attention.” It’s not the usual way words begin to exist.

A month later, the first example of phubbing in a major newspaper appeared in a letter to the editor of The Age, published in Melbourne. Since then, the word has appeared in various media the world over. Phubbing has yet to be fully adopted in the U. S. , but we have collected some evidence of it in use.

On 29 September 2015, James A. Roberts wrote in the Huffinington Post, “In the present case, phubbing is a combination of the words phone and snubbing. To be phubbed is to be snubbed by someone using their cell phone while in your company. The “phubb” could be an interruption of your conversation with someone when he or she uses their cell phone or is distracted by it (steal glances when they think you’re not looking) instead of paying attention to you. Maybe worse, you’ve been phubbed if someone used their cell phone instead of communicating with you while staying close to you. Oh, the shame. ”

The meaning and various forms of the word have yet to settle out. Is it phubbing if you’re staring at your tablet instead of your phone? Is the singular noun (and the base form of the verb) spelled phubb, as in the example above, or phub, as in some other sources? These are the sorts of questions we’ll need answers to before we’re ready to consider phubbing and its relations for entry. In the meanwhile, you can of course use phubbing if you feel the need. It seems we all do these days.

The full stop, which comes from Greek punctuation (标点符号), is usually used to express the end of a sentence but now it frightens young people when used in social media communication as a sign of anger.

According to experts, youngsters used to communicating electronically break up their thoughts by sending each one as a separate message, rather than using a full stop, which they use only to signal they are annoyed. Some have said the full stop is redundant when used in texting because the message is ended just by sending it. “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message.”

Owen McArdle from Cambridge University told the newspaper: “I’m not sure I agree about emails. I guess it depends how formal they are. But full stops are very much the exception in youngsters’ instant messages, and have a new role in expressing anger.”

In 2015, a study from Binghamton University in New York suggested that people who finish messages with full stops are considered insincere. The study involved 126 undergraduates and the researchers found that text messages ending in the most final of punctuation marks-eg “lol.”, “let’s go to Nando’s.”-were considered being less sincere. Unusually, texts ending in an exclamation point-“lmao!”, “what body part even is that? I hope it’s your arm!” -are thought heartfelt.

Research leader Celia Klin said at the time: “When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses and so on. People obviously can’t use these when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them-special signs, deliberate misspellings that imitate (模仿) speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

Handwritten Chinese characters (文字) can be beautiful. I still remember looking at Chinese and not understanding anything it said and yet feeling a strong attraction. In fact, some students start learning Chinese because of the characters. After having studied Chinese for a while, I realized that handwriting in Chinese takes a very long time to learn.

Living as we do in a digital era (数字时代) with smartphones and computers, most students sooner or later ask themselves this question: Is it really necessary to learn how to write by hand in Chinese? When using smartphones or computers, we can use phonetic input (语音输入) systems, which choose the characters we want for us as long as we can remember how they are pronounced. Since we enter different characters, we seldom need to be able to recognize the difference between characters in detail; the computer makes the right choices for us. Do we really need to write Chinese by hand at all?

I think most people agree that you should learn to write at least some characters at some point as a student of Chinese, although not necessarily straight away and not necessarily all the characters that you can say. But unless you don’t care about written language at all, you should learn the basics of handwriting. Without it, it will be very hard to understand characters. You don’t need to be a calligraphy master (书法大师), but you do need basic handwriting skills to do this. Simply looking at things is, as usual, a bad way of learning.

I think learning the most common 500 characters or so is a good idea for all students. If you actually want to write by hand, increase that to 1, 000. Then learn to handwrite characters outside of the 1, 000 most common on a need-to-know basis.