The development of common words into catchwords, besides their own semantic evolution, is more important than the external motivation of social events. In the era of Internet media, catchwords have become the most influential discourse facts and cultural phenomena in China in recent years. The Chinese popular language “tyrant” is a word with a strong historical color. The meaning of the word has gone through several periods of development. After the last period of the last use of the new China, it gradually withdrew from the historical stage. Recently, the word “Tu Hao” is very popular on the Internet. The words “Tu Hao Jin” and “rich boyfriend” derived from it are also popular among netizens. On Wei-bo, some people even launched a “friend” with “tyrant”, which shows its popularity.
Through the analysis of the Sina Wei-bo corpus, this paper combs the process of the generation, popularity and stereotype of the popular semantics of the “tyrant”, and finds that the big social events have a key influence on the evolution of the popular semantics of the “tyrant”.
We try to explore the direct influence of social events on the semantic evolution of catchwords through this case, and reveal the important role of event motivations in the process of language evolution.