It’s always tempting to apologize, when writing about technology, for how out of date this book is going to be at some point and all the areas that I inevitably haven’t covered. But that would be missing the point. The purpose of this book isn’t to enshrine internet language, like an unlucky dinosaur caught in quicksand, as if it’s a thing that I can capture and preserve. Rather, it’s to provide a snapshot of a particular era and a lens that we can use to look at future changes. When we study only formal language, we see through this tiny pinhole into what English can do. When we study
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