Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

What’s changed is that writing now comes in both formal and informal versions, just as speaking has for so long.

What’s cool about informal writing is that, once we had the technology to send any image anywhere, we used it to restore our bodies to our writing, to give a sense of who’s talking and what mood we’re in when we’re saying things. Take emoji, those small images that enliven our digital messages. There are thousands of them, ranging from animals to foods to nature to common household and workplace objects. And yet the most commonly used sets of emoji are the faces and hands, like the smile, the face with tears of joy, the thumbs up, and the crossed fingers. We use emoji less to describe the world around us, and more to be fully ourselves in an online world.

A less benign social media data controversy happened in 2018, when British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica was discovered to have obtained personal data from millions of Facebook users in 2015 by convincing people to link a personality quiz with their Facebook account. The personal data derived from the quiz was then used to target voters and potentially sway elections. The Library of Congress and Cambridge Analytica represent two extremes, but less publicized researchers have continued mining for data on social media, restricted only by terms of service and their own senses of fair play.

Twitter research is especially fruitful because about 1 to 2 percent of people who post on Twitter tag their tweets with their exact geographic coordinates. A reasonably competent data miner can therefore code up a county-level map of where Americans tweet “pop” versus “soda,” where they switch from “y’all” to “you guys,” or which states prefer which swear words—all in less time than it took Edmond Edmont to bike from Paris to Marseille. As a simple proof of concept, let’s look at the work of the linguist Jacob Eisenstein, who found that geo-tagged tweets containing “hella” (as in “That movie was hella long”) are most likely to occur in Northern California, while those containing “yinz” (as in “I’ll see yinz later”) are clustered around Pittsburgh. Both of these findings are consistent with previous linguistic research done in the labor-intensive interview style. Other features he found on Twitter probably wouldn’t have shown up in an interview: a later study by Eisenstein and colleagues found that the abbreviation “ikr” (“I know, right?”) was especially popular in Detroit, the emoticon ^_^ (happy) was characteristic of Southern California, and the spelling “suttin” (“something”) was popular in New York City.

It’s not an accident that Twitter, where you’re encouraged to follow people you don’t already know, has given rise to more linguistic innovation (not to mention memes and social movements) than Facebook, where you primarily friend people you already know offline. But geography and demographics and even networks aren’t destiny.

But “zed” has been acting really weird. The linguist J. K. Chambers did a survey of Canadian twelve-year-olds in the 1970s, and found that two-thirds of them said “zee”—but when he went back and surveyed the same population in the 1990s, he found that the vast majority were now using “zed” as adults. The same shift happened with successive generations. Chambers figured that children learn “zee” from the alphabet song and American children’s television programs like Sesame Street, but when they get older, they learn that “zed” is associated with Canadian identity and switch. Indeed, noted Chambers, “zed” is one of the first things that American immigrants to Canada change about their speech, “because calling it ‘zee’ unfailingly draws comments from the people they are talking to.”

Default computer spellings are powerful enough to have created a shift in British English since the 1990s: while American English prefers a Z in words like “organize” and “realize,” British English has traditionally used both -ise and -ize spellings. But spellchecks have tried to prevent people from spelling the same word differently within the same document by enforcing “organise” and “realise” all the time when set to British English, leading to an upswing in -ise endings among the general British typing public and the perception that -ize is only for Americans.

Some technolinguistic tools have been attempting to do just that, albeit with mixed results. Wikipedia, whose slogan is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” has been very effective at combating obvious vandalism with dedicated volunteer editors, but faces more subtle problems of bias in what it covers, because the volunteer editors it attracts are disproportionately male, well-off, and English speaking, and they tend to edit topics they’re already interested in.

Perhaps the most promising computational tool for fighting bias rather than reinforcing it is Textio. This is a startup that assesses the text of your job posting for whether certain words and phrases are likely to put people off applying, and thereby make the position take longer to fill, by sounding sexist or corporate jargony, flagging buzzwords like “big data” and “rockstars” in favor of “caregiver leave” and “learn new things.”

More recent research has shown that intonation in particular is related to social identity: young men in Washington, D.C., with one black and one white parent talk differently depending on whether they identify as black or biracial; the speech patterns of people living in Appalachia depend on how “rooted” they feel in the local community; and the speech of Jewish women in Ohio and New Jersey varies depending on their relationship with their Jewish identity.

Research on youth language in several countries shows a parallel trend: there are distinctive linguistic forms associated with economically and racially marginalized youth in contexts ranging from the American inner city to the banlieues of Paris to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Elements of their language then get picked up by white middle-class youth. They don’t adopt enough to make them no longer seem comfortably middle class, but just enough to strike a note of autonomy from parents, teachers, and other authority figures. Of course, when a word like “lit” or “bae” gets sufficiently associated with mainstream culture—and especially when it gets picked up by brands capitalizing on trends—it then loses its appeal to hip insiders, prompting the cycle to begin again.

In English, the association of words from African American English with coolness and their subsequent appropriation by non–African Americans is much older than the internet. Terms associated with African American music, including blues, jazz, rock and roll, and rap, have all made their way into broader Western culture, while the speakers who originated them continue to be stigmatized for the way they talk. One thing that changes with the decentralization of online media is that the original speakers can become more visible. While a white person in the sixties listening to Elvis might have had no idea that he was singing a style heavily influenced by black performers like B.B. King and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, it’s easier to see that mainstream America’s adoption of “on fleek” came from a post on Vine (a now defunct service for sharing short videos) by the user Peaches Monroee. Still, it’s tempting to mislabel the many words currently being appropriated into general American pop culture from African American English as “social media words” simply because they’re used by young people, and young people are on social media, without giving due credit to the words’ true origins. Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering America despite the millions of people who already lived there.

What Eisenstein and Pavalanathan found was that people used regionalisms like “hella,” slang like “nah” and “cuz,” emoticons like :), and other informal language more in the tweets that @mentioned another user, while the same people used a more standardized, formal style in their tweets with hashtags. They theorized that, just as in person we’d generally talk more formally when addressing a roomful of people than when talking one-on-one, we’re directing a tweet with a hashtag towards a large group of people. Our @mentions, on the other hand, are more informal, only noticed by a select few—and we adjust our language electronically the same way we do out loud.

If @replies on Twitter are slightly more casual than messages broadcast in hashtags, then texts are more intimate still, and sure enough, Indonesians used informal respellings like this almost four times more often in texts than in tweets. Tweets were also nearly twice as long as texts, on average, and contained more complex sentences and a larger variety of words.

The linguists Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis got seventy-one teenagers to donate the written records of their instant messaging conversations so that they could disentangle what they were actually doing. They found that the teens weren’t actually using internet slang all that much. Unlike examples from hyperbolic articles, where almost every word is replaced with slang (r u gna b on teh interwebz l8r?), only 2.4 percent of the actual teens’ messages were slang. (I’m reminded of the surveys of perception versus reality for other kinds of youth behavior, where everyone thinks everyone else is drinking more and having more sex than them.) What the teens were doing instead was more sophisticated: they intermixed the very informal features, like smiley faces and acronyms, with very formal ones, words like “must” and “shall” that are rare in speech.

By one estimate, over a third of couples who got married between 2005 and 2012 met online. By another, 15 percent of American adults have used online dating, and 41 percent know someone who has. The first year that marriages from internet dating were widely reported was 1995, which means that children born of the first internet-mediated relationships are—at least hypothetically—now old enough to internet date and have kids of their own. Internet grandbabies!

I asked people to sort themselves by age range: thirteen to seventeen, eighteen to twenty-three, twenty-four to twenty-nine, and thereafter by decade: thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and over seventy. I then asked them to select a grouping of social platforms that best represented when they first started socializing with people online. There were four options. Usenet, forums, IRC, BBS, listservs, or similar AIM, MSN Messenger, blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, or similar Facebook, Twitter, Gchat, YouTube, or similar Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, WhatsApp, or similar Both questions were optional and had a write-in box for other answers, but only 150 out of over 3,000 respondents either didn’t answer or wrote in something else. This means that 95 percent of people felt themselves adequately described by these four clusters of social platforms. I deliberately left out generic email and texting, because an email address or mobile phone number is the prerequisite for every other platform, and they have their own cross-generational communication styles, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 6. The survey doesn’t represent a random cross-section of the population, but it got at least a hundred responses in each age group from teens to fifty-plus, and if it overcounts anyone, it probably overcounts people who spend a lot of time on the internet, which is essentially what I was looking for anyway. I did the survey in 2017. Conveniently, this means we can subtract a neat two decades to...

Your experience of the internet and the language therein is shaped by who you were and who else was around at the time you joined. How much tech savvy was required to participate in conversations? Were you going online because your friends were already there, or to meet new people? Were you entering a community with established norms, or one where things were still in flux? And did you learn these norms implicitly, through immersion, or through an explicit rulebook? Your answers to these and similar questions have a big effect on what your variety of internet language looks like. In a world where, to use the expression of technologist Jenny Sundén, you’re writing yourself into existence, how you write is who you are.

To find strangers they wanted to socialize with, Old Internet People used topic-based tools like Usenet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), listservs, and forums. If you don’t know what some of these are, that’s kind of the point. Many of these platforms remained pretty obscure even after the internet caught on.

As a group, Old Internet People have the highest level of average technological skill, generally knowing a decent inventory of keyboard shortcuts, the basics in a programming language or two, and how to look at the inner workings of a computer behind its graphical user interface. They’re often skilled in some other specific area, such as computer hardware assembly, browser encryption, Wikipedia editing, or forum moderating. They’ve got a lot of browser extensions or other custom configuration tools on their computer and can’t imagine living without them.

What the Old Internet People have in common is that they still probably conduct a fair bit of their social lives online, often having a long-standing pseudonym that they use everywhere and internet-first friends that they’ve known for longer than some of their meatspace friends. They’re the social internet users most likely to have never gotten or to have barely used Facebook, because for them the internet is a place to tap into a global community rather than reinforce a local one.

The dominant narrative of the internet shifted from a story of hackers to a story of digital immigrants and digital natives: an older generation coming online and marveling at how a Net Generation, often the older generation’s children, was “born digital,” seeming to use computers as easily as they breathed.

These groups are correlated with age but not completely defined by it: the Full Internet People tended to be younger, still in school, and susceptible to new trends and what their peers considered cool, while the Semi Internet People tended to be older, in the workplace, and with an established social life. But the important distinction lies in what they were doing on the internet, rather than their exact age: in 1999, a newbie who sought out a topic-based messageboard to meet new people would still inherit many of the cultural touchstones of the Old Internet, while a second newbie who started instant messaging daily with existing friends would become Full Internet, and a third who got into forwarding funny chain emails would become Semi Internet. These newbies could all be the same age, but the speech communities they’d be joining would be very different. As with any generalization, it’s worth describing them in bright-line terms to clearly illustrate the options, but some may find themselves on the borders between one group and another.

Full Internet People came of age with the beginning of the social internet in the late 1990s to early 2000s. They joined an internet that had already established many of its communicative norms, and they acquired them, not explicitly from a Jargon File or FAQ but implicitly, from their peers joining at the same time, via the same cultural alchemy that transmits which music is cool or which jeans are desirable. The internet is “full” for this cohort because they never questioned its social potential: How could they, when they began by using it to communicate more with people they already knew? It would be absurd to assert that the internet is asocial or that Internet People are somehow not real when a breakup that happened last night over IM is all anyone can talk about the next day at lunch. IM, or instant messaging, like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN Messenger, and ICQ (I seek you), was new and at the core of the Full Internet People’s first internet social experience, as were personalized homepages and profile pages where you could add neon-colored backgrounds and small, blinky gifs, such as GeoCities, Angelfire, Xanga, Neopets, LiveJournal, and MySpace.

A few years after joining the social internet, Full Internet People also became the first Facebook and Twitter users. But here, my survey demographics are just as interesting for where this group wasn’t. We know for a fact that they were the first users of Facebook, because it was only open to Harvard students when it launched in 2004, before expanding to universities in general, then high school students, and to the general public in 2006. The catch is that very few people in this age range (less than 10 percent) had their first social experiences on Facebook. The founding populations of the Usenet group and the IM group were both people who were newly online; Facebook, by contrast, was founded by people who switched from an older platform to something new.

It wasn’t so much of a stretch to start using your real name on Facebook, when your online and offline selves had been effectively linked within the minds of your primary social network for years. In fact, it could be felt to be a sign of maturity that you weren’t performing your identity through your username anymore

As far as internet facility goes, Full Internet People have some nostalgia for earlier technology and some insecurity about whether they’ve lost touch with what younger people are doing online, but they’re well adapted to both social networking sites and professional electronic communication. They have at least one and possibly many social media accounts, and get a lot of their news and entertainment online, whether that’s from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Netflix, or podcasts. They’ve been serving as family tech support since adolescence and they’re one of the primary vectors by which new technology percolates into the mainstream. They’re comfortable with a variety of phones, computers, and other devices, as well as email, instant messaging, general internet browsing, word processing, and probably other office tools like spreadsheets and presentations.

While Full Internet People may or may not remember a time before they had home internet access, they definitely don’t remember an internet without basic internet slang. Abbreviations like “lol” and “wtf,” emoticons like :-) and <3, and conventions like all caps for shouting were already in place. They picked up most of their internet slang from context and their peers, and associate it with tone of voice.

They’re “semi” because they’re only partially committed to an internet social life: they may have some relationships that they keep up with via the internet, especially younger family members, and some where they do so by other means, especially old friends, but they’ve retained a cautious attitude towards getting to know people primarily online. At any rate, they have vivid memories of what it was like to maintain relationships via letters and phone calls.

Around two-thirds of internet users below age twenty-five used at least one social networking site, but only around half of twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds and a third of those forty-five and over did the same. In the years after 2007, a lot of the older group started using social networking sites, or as the media put it, “My parents just got Facebook.” In 2017, Pew Research estimated that over 60 percent of American adults between fifty and sixty-four had become users of Facebook, not even counting other social networks.

Despite their facility with familiar tools, despite the fact that they’re now just as likely to be providing tech support to their own elderly parents or older friends as receiving it from younger people, they still consider themselves “not really a computer person.” Their first reaction when encountering a new technological task is to ask for help from a person they know offline, such as their half-grown offspring or a younger coworker. Or sometimes merely the nearest available offline person—a middle-aged couple at a café once asked me to fix some app on their phone based on no other qualification than the fact that I was sitting next to them with my laptop. I can’t say it’s an ineffective strategy: I did, after all, successfully fix the phone. But it was a problem that I, too, had never encountered before, and I solved it by dint of the process described in an xkcd comic titled “Tech Support Cheat Sheet,” which reads, in part, “Find a menu item or button which looks related to what you want to do → Click it → Did it work? → No? → (repeat) → I’ve tried them all → Google the name of the program plus a few words related to what you want to do.” I’ve asked people in coffeeshops for the wifi password or if they can pass me a menu, but for tech problems I turn to digital people: googling with the hope that a helpful expert has written a comprehensive how-to article, but willing to settle for a random person on a forum five years ago who had the same issue.

Like how Old Internet People defined themselves by knowledge of technology and excitement about meeting other people through it, their age-mates who became Semi Internet People defined themselves by ambivalence towards technology and an orientation towards offline relationships over online ones. Facebook was successful among Semi Internet People because it let them replicate their offline network rather than trying to encourage them to make internet friends.

But Semi Internet People didn’t start using the social internet with Facebook: they started with email, which I deliberately left off my survey because it was popular with everyone before and during the time that the internet became mainstream.

People learned “lol” from their peers, in the social crucible of the internet, where words—and especially time-saving acronyms—are in all lowercase unless they’re emphatic. And while “lol” started out indicating laughter, it quickly became aspirational, a way of showing your appreciation of a joke or defusing a slightly awkward situation even if you didn’t technically laugh at it. As early as 2001, the linguist David Crystal was doubting how many lols were truly out loud, and as one widely shared Reddit post put it, “We should change ‘lol’ to ‘ne’ (nose exhale), because that’s all we really do when we see something funny online.”

I did a survey of how people used “lol” in 2017, and found a word in transition. Not only was it steadily losing its capitalization, but its meaning was also evolving. Over half of Semi Internet People indicated that they used it to indicate laughing out loud, although a substantial proportion also said they could use it for general amusement that wasn’t necessarily actual laughter.

The third wave of Internet People trickled online after the population as a whole had already done so, when the internet had become unavoidable. Half of this wave are those who are too young to remember life before the internet and started going online as they learned how to read and type: these are Post Internet People. The second half is older, consisting of people who thought they could just ignore this whole internet thing but eventually, belatedly, decided to join: we’ll call them the Pre Internet People.

Pre Internet People generally have one account somewhere that a more adept internet person set up for them, which may be on email, “the Facebook,” a text chat app like WhatsApp, or videochat like Skype or FaceTime. They know how to do basic things like send and receive messages there, but if they ever get logged out or if the app changes its interface, they’re going to have to ask for help again. They might only use the internet through a touchscreen device like a smartphone or tablet, but if they use a computer, they probably have a desktop shortcut helpfully labeled “The Internet” or “E-Mail,” and woe betide them if anything ever happens to it. They definitely can’t code, and they may not even know how to copy-paste, but some do know how to touch-type: they learned on an actual typewriter.

In many ways, this oldest internet cohort is more interesting than the younger ones. We have some idea of what it means to be a young person with internet-mediated friendships. There’s not that much difference between a late-1990s teenager constantly sending mundane but vital updates via AOL Instant Messenger and creating social drama about who was in their top eight friends on MySpace and a mid-2010s teen who’s constantly sending mundane but vital updates via Snapchat and creating social drama about who liked whose selfie on Instagram. But we haven’t seen an older generation mass-adopt a large-scale communications technology in quite a while—perhaps not since the invention of the telephone. So far, we’re only getting the first glimmerings of what it’s like for a whole cohort of seniors to be longtime Internet People, but small-scale efforts to teach older folks how to use the internet do suggest it can lead them to feeling more socially connected. I’d love to see a proper corpus study comparing postcards and texts from younger and older people, to see what else we can learn by drawing together informal writing across different generations and mediums.

The Pre Internet People don’t feel socially connected to the internet even when they do use it, and the Post Internet People are the inverse: socially influenced by the internet regardless of their own level of use. They don’t remember the first time they used a computer or did something online, the way that earlier generations don’t remember when they first watched a television or used a telephone, and they can talk about the social implications of following and liking even if they don’t personally have an account on a given platform or even use social media at all. It’s just part of the social landscape.

Practically speaking, the bright line question that divides Full and Post Internet People is often, did you get Facebook before or after your parents? Or in more general terms, did you arrive on the social internet after it was already ubiquitous, or were you on it when it was still a niche or young-person thing? In the survey that I did in 2017, the first social platform of the thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds was a pretty even split between either the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gchat cluster or the Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, WhatsApp cluster. About a third of eighteen- to twenty-three-year-olds joined them in selecting the Facebook cluster.

The true influence of Post Internet People on general internet socialization was both more subtle and more important than simply a shiny new social networking site. By joining the social internet after their parents were already there, they faced an especially dire version of “context collapse.” This is danah boyd’s term for when people from all your overlapping friend groups see all your shared posts from different aspects of your life. For adults who occasionally see a coworker’s personal photos or political updates, context collapse is a fairly minor issue, a problem of specific individuals being indiscreet. For young people, context collapse is a collective problem: they need space to figure out who they are, where they aren’t being constantly supervised by authority figures. The Full Internet People solved this problem by using social tools that their parents weren’t on, jumping ship for a new one every couple years to remake their networks afresh, and leaving their cringiest moments buried on defunct platforms. Friendster gave way to MySpace gave way to Facebook. Social networking sites tried to solve this and prevent themselves from being abandoned by letting people set privacy settings and pick a specific list of people to share each post with. But switching platforms every couple years and keeping all your friends sorted into lists gets tiring. Post Internet People instead came up with a more durable strategy, organized along three principles.

First, things should disappear more, the way conversations throughout history have naturally not left records. Private messages that vanish after they’re seen, live video streaming, manual deletion of old posts, and story-style posts that only stay visible for twenty-four hours all reduce the likelihood that messages will be encountered outside their intended context. Second, not all social networks need to be all things to all people. Rather than using a single dominant social platform, or maintaining an account on every single one, you pick and choose your platforms to help control your contexts, perhaps interacting with school friends on Instagram and fandom friends on Twitter, or doing more résumé-safe activities with a public account under your real name but putting more private activities into a locked or pseudonymous account. Finally, social groups also need to be organized at levels more fluid and granular than an entire platform, including both large, open options like hashtags and public groups, and small, closed options like groupchats or secret groups.

Emphatic caps feel like the quintessential example of internet tone of voice, and sure enough, they’ve been around since the very early days online: linguist Ben Zimmer found people in old Usenet groups explaining that all caps meant yelling as far back as 1984. What’s more intriguing is that capitals were available for emphasis long before the internet as well.

Another way to do emphasis online is by repeatingggggg letterrrrssss, especially for emotive words like “yayyyy” or “nooo.” Just like shouty capitals, the origins of this practice predate the internet by maanyyy years. I searched the Corpus of Historical American English for sequences of at least three of the same letter (to eliminate common English words like “book” and “keep”). The corpus contains texts from 1810 to 2009, but to my surprise, there were hardly any results in the first half of the corpus. The few earlier examples were mostly just typos, like “commmittee,” or numerals, like “XXXIII.” Here’s the oldest real example I could find, a character pretending to be a candy-seller in a novel published in 1848: “Confectionary, confectionary,” he cried, bursting into a louder tone of voice, which rang forth clear and deep-toned, as a bell. “Confectionary!” and then he added with grotesque modulations of his voice, “Confecctunarrry!” “By Jove, how this reminds me of the little fellow in London. I’ll go the complete candy-seller. I might as well.” “Ladies and gentlemen! Here’s your fine candy, lozenges, apples, oranges, cakes and tarts! Heeeere’s your chance!” The “grotesque modulations” of this 1840s faux confectioner were an anomaly, ahead of their time.

Even now-commonplace elongations of sounds like “ahhh,” “oooh,” “hmmm,” “ssshh,” and “brrr” don’t start showing up in this historical corpus until the decade before and after 1900, whereupon they increase steadily for the next hundred years, displacing word-like versions such as “ahem” and “hush.”

Research on politeness in internet communities finds that many elements of it mirror politeness offline. It’s well established that politeness decreases with power—you’re more polite to your boss than to your underling.

Another method of building solidarity online is to joke around and create shared references that only an in-group truly understands. In-jokes are hardly exclusive to the internet, but they have a particularly internettish manifestation: we can bend the functional and technical tools of hypermediated text to a more social purpose, indicating that we’re the type of people who understand a particular tool so well that we can play around with it.

A more common typographical tool is *asterisks* and _underscores_ as a way of emphasizing in environments that don’t support proper bold or italic. But asterisks also look like tiny stars, and early internet denizens seized on their decorative potential as well, especially when combined with the fanciful swoop of the ~tilde~. In the plain text of late 1990s and early 2000s instant messenger status messages, sparkle punctuation would range from ~*just one*~ of each all the way up to ~~~~~~******~~~~~~so many sparkles~~~~~~******~~~~~~; ~*~*~*~alternating~*~*~*~ or ~**~~*~~in combination~~*~~**~~; mixed with wOrDs iN mIxEd cAPiTaLiZaTiOn, e x t r a s p a c e s, and ✧･ﾟ: ☆ *✧･ﾟ:* ★ extra star symbols ✧･ﾟ: ☆ *✧･ﾟ:* ★. With advances in technology, people also made the text multicolored, , or used emoji, built-in fonts, ⓔⓝⓒⓛⓞⓢⓔⓓ ⓛⓔⓣⓣⓔⓡⓢ, or øвຣ∁υℛe ടYℳ♭০ℓS for aesthetic effect.* It’s unsurprising, then, that aesthetic typography became especially popular with successive generations of teens on instant messengers and MySpace and Tumblr, digital versions of the elaborate doodles and intricate folded paper notes once passed in class.

The hash mark itself, also known as the number sign, pound sign, or octothorpe, dates back hundreds of years, originally a hastily written version of the abbreviation lb from Latin libra pondo, “a pound by weight,” as in 3# potatoes @ 10￠/#. In the early days of the internet, the hash mark, as a relatively underutilized symbol available on a standard QWERTY keyboard, was repurposed for a variety of technical functions. One of these was organizational. In chatrooms, you could type in “join #canada” or “join #hamradio” to talk with Canadians or ham radio enthusiasts. On

There was Henry Denham, a British printer who used a mirrored question mark (؟) to distinguish rhetorical questions in 1575, and John Wilkins, a British natural philosopher, who proposed an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to indicate irony in 1668. After them, there were three centuries of French writers proposing variously shaped “points d’ironie”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted the need for one in 1781, Alcanter de Brahm in 1899 proposed another version of ؟, and Hervé Bazin in 1966 proposed the Greek letter ψ with a dot below. In more recent years, a backwards-slanting italics known as “ironics” or “sartalics” was attributed to several American newspaper columnists in the latter half of the twentieth century, the upside-down exclamation mark (¡) was again proposed in 2004, this time by a former writer for The Onion, and in 2010, a swirl with a dot in the middle was patented under the name SarcMark and sold for noncommercial use at the bargain (؟) price of $1.99. All to no avail. The problem with adopting new irony punctuation is that if the people reading you don’t understand it, you’re no better off than without it. Pointing out after the fact that you’re using a new sarcasm punctuation mark is about as much fun as explaining the joke. It’s even worse if the people receiving your sarcastic messages have to pay two bucks and install a new font just so they can have your joke explained.