Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

For the tilde ~ symbol, there were several Urban Dictionary entries for it before 2008, such as “used at the end of words to make them longer” in 2007, but none of them mention sarcasm. The first time an Urban Dictionary entry mentioned sarcasm was in 2008 (giving the example “OMG that’s soo cool~”), followed by two more entries mentioning sarcasm in 2009. There’s our timeline. But for meaning, what’s interesting about the evolution of the ~sarcasm tilde~ was that you could figure it out without Urban Dictionary at all.

What’s curious here is that after 2006, there was a marked decrease in people complaining about when people don’t capitalize. Okay, we might think, maybe they just got used to lowercasing, the way that people have chilled out about emoticons or internet acronyms since they first became popular. But then, a few years later, a new under-capitalizing supervillain began ravaging cyberspace. This time, the people complaining weren’t forum posters. They were publications that cater to young people, like Teen Vogue, BuzzFeed, and the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper. And the crime associated with lowercasing wasn’t laziness but passive aggression. Trend pieces about passive-aggressive texting started around 2013 and really got going in 2015 and 2016. These pieces pointed out that this same minimalist typography was liable to make your friends wonder why you’re mad at them. Typing in lowercase was no longer an issue of laziness or efficiency: it became a way of indicating attitude. So what happened between 2006 and 2013? The rise of smartphones—phones with large touchscreens, internet access, and on-screen keyboards that were much better at predictive text than the previous generation of non-touchscreen, many-buttoned cellphones—neatly correlates with the exact time span we’re interested in. The first iPhone came out in 2007, and American smartphone sales first surpassed sales of non-smart cellphones in 2011, with the same shift happening globally in 2013. A predictive keyboar...

I did an informal poll on Twitter in 2016, asking, “When you write on your phone, do you ever undo the autocapitalization for the sake of aesthetic?” and the results were very clear: of the five hundred–plus people who replied, over half said that they do so all the time, with another third saying “sometimes” and only 14 percent saying “never.”

Based on the locations of these early trend pieces, it seems that minimalist typography is a younger-people thing. But there’s a catch-22 when it comes to analyzing youth language: your intuitions about it are inversely proportional to your ability to write about it. I can assert things with confidence about the slang of the 1990s and 2000s, but as the 2010s continue, I’m already feeling myself slipping out of touch, even as my platform to write about it grows larger. The point at which you’re a native speaker with the sharpest intuitions, the most deeply embedded into your particular youth subculture, with friends your age who think it would be a lark to let you analyze their posts or texts, is also the point when you’re likely to be writing your very first research paper or conference presentation, if you’re lucky. You know what’s cool, but no one knows who you are or why they should be reading you. Some linguists work on youth language by involving their undergraduate students; others by partnering with local schools. I do it via the internet. I started a blog called All Things Linguistic when I was still in grad school, and I made it on Tumblr because I was familiar with the platform from previous meme blogs. Initially, the blog was a way of not getting too high up the ivory tower. I started posting tips for students I was teaching, links to articles I was reading, and fun linguistic things that I came across in my everyday life. As I realized that I enjoyed this publi...

If polite typography, as we saw earlier, is about making extra effort, using initial capitals and friendly exclamation marks to signal cheerful distance or genuine enthusiasm, then ironic typography is the opposite on both counts: it introduces a note of dissonance that makes the reader look harder to find the double meaning. Any variation from an expected baseline will do, whether that’s lowercasing, sparkle sarcasm, asking a rhetorical question by omitting the question mark, or ironically using outdated slang (one much-reblogged post on Tumblr noted that saying something is “great” indicates that it’s genuinely good, whereas something that’s described as “gr8” is a guilty pleasure or appreciated sarcastically). But crucially, irony requires this baseline in the first place. It required us to develop a set of typographical resources for indicating straightforward types of voices, like shouting and enthusiasm, before we could creatively subvert them.

The closest thing most of us have to a social avatar is the profile picture we use on social media apps—hardly the ambitious three-dimensional graphics that Second Life or Snow Crash imagined. True, profile pictures do provide some sense of who you’re talking to and what they (or their dog) look like. But they’re static. My profile pic has the same fixed, photographic smile, regardless of the message I type beside it. What we really need is a dynamic system. Punctuation is good at representing tone of voice, but we’re still missing something, something embodied. This was the void that emoticons and emoji stepped into, those smiley faces made from repurposed punctuation marks and those small pictures of faces and hearts and animals and all manner of other objects.

Less than one in a thousand messages were long enough that they might qualify as a potential emoji story. In fact, the only people I’ve been able to find who regularly communicate with extended emoji sequences are preliterate children. Many parents have told me about how their two- to five-year-old kids enjoy texting them messages full of dinosaur or animal emoji—but then these same kids start sending words instead of emoji once they learn how to read.

One use of emoji that’s explicitly beat-related comes when each word is followed by a clapping hands emoji, as in WHAT ARE YOU DOING . This started as an emoji representation of a beat gesture common among African American women. Comedian Robin Thede described the “double clap on syllables” in a Nightly Show segment on “Black Lady Sign Language.” But as writer Kara Brown put it when the gesture started making mainstream news headlines, “This—this clapping on every word for emphasis—is something that I have done since I was a cantankerous youth.” In 2016, it started spreading to mainstream Twitter users unaware of its offline, African American origins. But whether online or offline, it’s a beat.

Here’s the original message that he posted, dug up from dusty 1980s archives, from back when computer records were preserved on reel-to-reel tapes: 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c> I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-( The idea of a simplified smiling face already had a considerable history, so Fahlman’s sideways proposal was straightforward to interpret. It was also easy to type, and was thus quickly picked up by other participants in the message thread, and within a couple months people were using sideways text faces beyond Carnegie Mellon and had come up with a wide variety of creative expansions on the sideways idea, including non-face examples like the heart <3 and the rose @>-->--. Many of the more elaborate examples, like sideways portraits of famous people, circulated more in lists of clever faces than in actual usage. (It’s unclear when a person would ever need to invoke Abraham Lincoln by smiley, but here he is ==(:-)= complete with tall hat and beard.) A few classics like :-) :-( ;-) :’-( :-P, and later their noseless variants :) :( ;) :’( :P, remained the most popular.

Filling an important niche, the text-based emoticons grew and changed. The meaning of the basic smile shifted after Scott Fahlman’s original proposal, from indicating a joke to indicating a more general positive sentiment, a marker of sincerity: “that’s great :)” is sincere, not sarcastic. The nose fell out of favor among younger people: in 2011, a study of emoticons on Twitter by linguist Tyler Schnoebelen found that noseful emoticons were used by people who also tended to tweet to celebrities like Pepe Aguilar, Ashton Kutcher, and Jennifer Lopez, whereas those who tweeted noseless emoticons tended to prefer to tweet to Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Selena Gomez. (For the benefit of readers from the future who don’t have a degree in Early Twenty-First Century American Pop Culture, I’ll point out that Justin Bieber and the like were very popular among teenagers in 2011, while Kutcher, Lopez, et al. were an older set of celebrities. This strongly suggests that younger people were dropping the noses in their emoticons.)

Around the same time as emoticons were developing in the United States and on English-speaking networks, another form of digital face was developing on an early Japanese computer network known as ASCII Net. They were called kaomoji, from the Japanese kao (顔, “face”) and moji (文字, “character”). Kaomoji are like emoticons, but you don’t have to turn your head sideways to read them, allowing for virtually any pair of symbols to be used to represent the shape of the eyes, not just symbols like :) and =) that are already found in a pair. Classic kaomoji such as ^_^ (happy), T_T (crying), and o.O (wide-eyed) are nearly as old as emoticons—there are claims of them appearing on ASCII Net as early as 1985 or 1986.

Although the word “emoji” resembles the English “emoticon” (“emotion” + “icon”), the word actually comes from the Japanese e (絵, “picture”) and moji (文字, “character”), the same moji as in kaomoji. This coincidence did probably help the word catch on among English speakers, but typing the symbols wasn’t quite as straightforward. These small, easy-to-send pictures quickly became popular in Japan, and other Japanese cellphone carriers got busy adding their own sets of emoji. But here they ran into a problem. The whole point of emoji was to save space by assigning number codes to small pictures, but different phone manufacturers were using different sets of images and different number codes for them. So if you had a phone with DoCoMo and you texted a heart emoji to your friend whose phone was from SoftBank, your friend might see an indecipherable box, nothing at all, or worse yet, an entirely different symbol like an umbrella or a music note. (One common point of confusion was that people who thought they were sending a Taurus zodiac sign from DoCoMo phones would end up appearing to have sent a picture of a normal cow when received on a KDDI phone. Which could be...awkward.)

Now encoded, emoji arrived on Apple devices in 2011 and Android in 2013. The international support and cross-device compatibility solved a problem for Japanese texters, but it also helped emoji become popular outside of Japan. And become popular they did. Just five years after emoji entered the international stage, in early 2015, the most popular emoji, tears of joy , surpassed the usage level of the most popular emoticon, :).

As more and more people from around the world began using emoji, however, it became more and more apparent that even 608 symbols weren’t enough. People started questioning—If there’s a unicorn and a dragon, why no dinosaur? If there’s a man in a turban, why not a woman in a hijab? If there’s sushi and hamburgers, why no taco or dumpling? All of these emoji have been added, many in response to proposals from ordinary people who figured out the process from the Unicode website or with the help of grassroots emoji proposals organization Emojination. But the set of emoji remains a work in progress: the Unicode Consortium is still taking requests, still rolling out a hundred or so new emoji each year.

Even with these expansions, the official Unicode process is slow and deliberative by design. At its core, Unicode is still a unique, uniform, universal encoding system. The goal is to create symbols that work on every device in the world long into the future. No more blank boxes. This means that once Unicode adds a symbol, they never remove it—doing so would defeat the purpose of a unified standard. That’s also why Unicode doesn’t accept emoji proposals for celebrities and pop culture references. They’d be fun for a while, but our great-grandchildren won’t really need their keyboards cluttered with the faces of one-hit wonders from the early twenty-first century. To get around this, there are individual apps that use an emoji aesthetic with larger, more of-the-moment pictures, which are sent as normal imag...

Linguist Allan Metcalf reported a recent college graduate explaining to him around the same time: “I almost always say ‘hey’ in speech but I have free variation between ‘hi’ and ‘hey’ in writing. . . . I have a sort of three-way formality distinction for greetings—‘hey’ for friends my own age or younger, ‘hi’ for adults I know well or people my own age I’m just meeting, and ‘hello’ for adult strangers.” Someone born in 2000 could justifiably point out that “hey” has been used as a greeting for their entire life, while someone born in 1950 could, equally justifiably, say, “But I don’t feel greeted by ‘hey,’ I feel summoned!”

You could add more boxes for more people: a chat program created in 1973 called Talkomatic, on a system called PLATO at the University of Illinois, provided five boxes, stacked on top of each other, so it could support up to five participants. One of these boxes was yours to type in, and then you had to keep scanning the others to see what the other people were saying, keystroke by keystroke, each in their own box. Here’s a demonstration, because this paradigm is really very different from all the chat systems you’re used to.

Chat is also competing with email in professional contexts. For instance, Slack is a chat platform for talking with workplace teams. The first time I got to talk with my internet service provider’s tech support via chat rather than on the phone, it was a delight to be able to simply type in the correct spelling of my name and address rather than having to spell out each part aloud. With digital assistants that can set timers or respond to our queries about what the weather’s going to be tomorrow, chat is also becoming an interface for us to talk with the machine itself. The key feature of chat is its real-time nature, but what it means to be real-time has shifted as our internet norms have shifted. When the internet was a place for die-hard hobbyists to explore new people to talk to, in the days of chatrooms full of strangers, the room would announce your arrival to those who were already there (“________ has entered the chat”) and your departure to those who remained (“_________ has exited the chat”).

Being real-time is also chat’s greatest weakness. You can set aside a time to batch-reply to emails or check social media, but chat requires a certain generic availability in order to be useful. Chats or text messages, which have become pretty much indistinguishable, have the potential to intrude on whatever else you’re doing, especially on a mobile device. But this isn’t the first time we’ve faced technological interruption: once again, we can draw insight from the early days of landline telephone use. Before the phone, letters only arrived at designated times of the day, and no one knew if and when you read them; only certain people lived close enough to drop by unexpectedly. But a phone call could arrive from anyone, anywhere, and the only thing you knew about the caller was that someone wanted you—urgently. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, a 1992 survey found that the overwhelming majority of people would answer a ringing telephone even during a serious argument with their spouse. I tried replicating the survey myself twenty-five years later, and found the exact opposite result: people overwhelmingly wouldn’t pick up the phone during a serious discussion with a loved one. Even if nothing particular was going on, people often reported checking to see who was calling before deciding whether to answer. I didn’t find the expected age gap, between people who’d acquired their phone norms with landlines and those who oriented towards cellphones: rather, the people who reported a...

This shift in norms is responsible for finally popularizing videocalling. The technology for the videophone has been available since the 1960s—it’s just a telephone spliced with a television, after all. Pundits kept predicting it, but it never seemed to catch on. The problem with videocalling was that it faced an insurmountable social obstacle: with a robust norm of always answering a ringing phone and no efficient way to plan a phone call except via the same medium, the risk was too great of catching someone unclothed or with a messy house in the background. Picking up a videocall out of the blue was simply too awkward to contemplate. But since every videochat program includes a text messaging feature, you can plan a videochat before committing to one (“hey, you ready to skype?” “just give me 2 min”) and this awkwardness vanishes: you have the option to decline via text where no one can see you, or a minute to scramble into a decent-looking shirt. Paradoxically, having access to the lesser intrusiveness of chat conversations makes it easier to have higher-bandwidth conversations in video.

When Facebook and Twitter started letting you post status updates, their appeal was explained in terms of ambient awareness of what your friends were doing, which could lead to spontaneous encounters or being able to pick up a conversation later as if no time had passed, without needing to catch up first. Facebook status updates in 2006 came with a few dropdown options meant to reflect typical college activities, like “is sleeping,” “is studying,” “is in class,” or “is at a party.” Even when you typed in your own status message, the “is” was obligatory and a period was automatically inserted at the end, clearly trying to push people in the direction of a particular genre of update. While early tweets didn’t have the same grammatical constraints, they still tended to be about the here and now, such as “walking on the sunny side of the street,” “digesting a burrito,” and “just setting up my twttr.”

There’s an important difference between physical and virtual third places, however. My local pub or barbershop or park is in principle open to anyone, but in practice circumscribed by both geography and custom: only so many people live nearby or can fit inside, and it’s quite clear that I belong neither among the clientele of a barbershop nor (anymore) among the teenagers hanging out in the park. The only things limiting the third places of the internet are customs, and those customs are still evolving. Sometimes, the unbounded geography of the internet is amazing: I can carry friends in my pocket everywhere I go, and there’s someone around at every time of the day or night. Airports are no longer impersonal, insomnia is no longer isolating, and the most mundane grocery run can be livened up by a quick exchange with a pocket friend. Other times, the lack of physical cues is more complicated. I can see the dozen or so people who are sitting around a table or lounging with me in a hallway, but the potential audience for a given post ranges from “zero” to “every single one of the billions of people on the internet,” and I can’t necessarily tell which one it’s going to be until after I’ve posted it. If I tell a joke at a pub or a coffeeshop, it may fall flat, but at least I know whether I’m being ignored.

A less subtle way of navigating the relationship between the public and the obscure is found in subtweeting (subliminal tweets) or vaguebooking (vague facebooking), the art of posting elliptically about a social situation without naming names. Posting a song lyric has plausible deniability: it could just mean you enjoy that song and it’s stuck in your head. But if someone posts, “I just don’t have time for this nonsense,” it’s obvious even to the completely uninitiated that some kind of drama is going on; it’s just that only certain people are going to already have the right context to interpret it. Asking what’s going on is like interrupting an arguing couple at a restaurant to ask for a detailed relationship history: a definite faux pas. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself or resign yourself to not knowing. A study of subtweets among college students found indirect posts were indeed considered a more socially acceptable way of conveying negative information than directly mentioning the person in question. (For example, “Thanks to a certain person for backstabbing and completely ruining my day. People like that are pathetic.” While people recognized the passive aggression, they preferred it to a version that named and shamed the specific person involved.) The inverse was the case for positive posts—it was considered better to tag someone directly in a post like “Thanks @RyanS for completely making my day. You’re awesome.”

When you say “The City,” which city are you referring to? This is a great way to start an argument. A lot of people will declare for a few classic regional lodestones: London, New York, San Francisco. People already in those metropolitan areas will explain that, actually, the true city is a more specific historic center like Manhattan or the City of London. A smaller number of people will champion a wide array of local centers of gravity, such as Chicago, Toronto, Winnipeg, Norwich, Detroit, New Orleans, Bristol, Seattle, Vancouver, Oklahoma City, Melbourne, Sydney, and Washington, D.C. When I was growing up in Nova Scotia, everyone knew that “I’m going to the city this weekend” clearly meant you were heading to Halifax. People disagree, but everyone who has an answer is really sure about it. This is not just the narcissism of modern urbanites. So clear was it to residents of medieval Constantinople that their city was The City that they eventually renamed it as such—Istanbul is a variant of Middle Greek stambóli, from colloquial Greek s tan Póli, “in the City.”

A year later, I was spending more and more time on the internet, a necessary diversion from the master’s thesis I was supposed to be writing. I started seeing a new style of image meme, one that avoided the one-two setup and payoff in black-bordered white Impact for a series of smaller phrases scattered around the face of a round-faced dog in Comic Sans. One with—joy of joys—a new and peculiar grammar. I started analyzing it in my head, vowing that I’d write up a description of this new meme the moment my thesis was in. This was a meme known as doge, based on a photo by Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato of her shiba inu, and I ultimately wrote a linguistic analysis of it for the eclectic and now sadly departed website The Toast in 2014. Doge was one of several memes that sprouted with this scattered interior monologue caption style, which draws on the minimalist typography that we saw in Chapter 4. A later example was snek, which was based on multiple photos of snakes and often featured softened swear words like “heck” and the phrase “doing you a [verb].”

But that’s not the end of the meme story. During the 2016 US presidential election, memes became more popular than ever, often as a way of making abhorrent beliefs look appealingly ironic. This phenomenon spawned serious op-eds about political memes from mainstream outlets like USA Today and The Guardian, a Know Your Meme entry considerably more extensive than the ones for the previous two elections, and even an official HillaryClinton.com meme explainer of why the Pepe the Frog meme was linked to white supremacy. Mike Godwin himself felt the need to clarify that Godwin’s Law only applied to frivolous Holocaust comparisons, not to calling out genuine similarities, tweeting, “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.” Around the same time, “wholesome” memes of cute doggos and puppers rejuvenated social media feeds that seemed daily filled with fresh horrors.

In 2017, an article for the news site Mic reported on a trend in prestigious US college admissions: students were making and sharing memes on college-specific Facebook groups, as a way of bonding with fellow students or making friends before arriving at school. Some prospective students even assessed the quality of a college’s memes in deciding whether to go there. As the then eighteen-year-old Brandon Epstein, founder of MIT Memes for Intellectual Beings and Spicy Memelords, put it, “We’re the ones that have been most immersed in meme culture. When last year’s freshmen became freshmen, memes weren’t the cultural monolith they are now. Considering that memes really rose to mainstream prominence during the time when we were in high school, I think there’s a bigger focus on memes for people my age.” At first glance, this looks contradictory. How is it that we have a college student in 2014 claiming that memes are dead and, three meme-filled years later, a different college freshman claiming that the students only a year older don’t truly understand memes?

If we think of memes as a claim on internet culture, things become clearer. Memes periodically shift away from one of their founder populations. Those particular memes, to that particular group, are indeed dead. But as long as people are creating culture on the internet, a different group will emerge with a different format to take up the mantle of “meme.” Memes had shifted yet again, from the Full Internet People to the Post Internet People, the ones who had no recollection of a life without internet. The meme is not dead: it’s reborn.

What’s unique about memes, then, isn’t that they’re participatory, or that they remix visuals and stock figures. What makes a meme a meme instead of a cartoon, a joke, or a fad is the same thing that lends a frisson of irony to the claim that my grandfather had a meme stash: a meme is an atom of internet culture, and my grandfather was never really an internet person. Creating, sharing, or laughing at a meme is staking a claim to being an insider: I am a member of internet culture, it says, and if you don’t get this, then you aren’t.

Like all cultures, internet culture is referential, baffling to outsiders, relying more on shared history than explicit instruction. Like all cultures, it’s not truly a single culture: it has some parts that are widely shared and others that occupy tiny niches. Like all cultures, importantly, it’s in flux, however neatly we archive our favorite parts and attempt to pass them down to our offspring.

If we look at how frequently people wrote the phrase “English language” across all the books scanned by Google, from 1500 to 2000, we see a major upswing between 1750 and 1800. It’s consistently low beforehand, and consistently high thereafter. “English” and “language” by themselves are pretty much steady—it’s just the two words together that go up. What happened in that period? Well, in 1755, Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language, the first major English print dictionary. Johnson’s dictionary became widely cited, and Johnson was interested in defining exactly what the English language consisted of. As he put it in the dictionary’s preface: “I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.”

Just as we find things on the internet by following links from one place to another, language spreads and disseminates through our conversations and interactions. We each inhabit our own idiosyncratic corner of the internet, a weird mix of friends, acquaintances, people we haven’t talked with in ages, and people we secretly think are way too cool for us. Likewise, we each speak a slightly different idiolect informed by our entire unique linguistic history.

When we thought of language as a book, we thought of it as linear and finite. A book can only have so many pages, so you have to decide what to keep in, what to fence out, and how to order what remains. If you and I buy the same dictionary, we read the same exact words, making it seem like there is a single, finite English language that everyone agrees upon, which can be contained between two covers. But the internet has no beginning or end, and it’s growing faster than any one person can follow. Sure, it does technically take up space, in the form of fiber-optic cables running under oceans and chilled rows of hard drives in data centers, but while a book is always telling your hands how many pages it has left, an internet device is a portal to a universe bigger than you can fathom.

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 informal language, we open our minds wide. We step out of the library and see the complexity of the wide world that surrounds us.

Around 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, and the vast majority of them have only a tiny amount of representation on the internet. Wikipedia only has articles in 299 languages, and half of those languages have less than ten thousand articles. Google Translate supports 109 languages, but many of the language pairs are translated via English. Major social networks support even fewer: Facebook’s interface is available in about 100, Twitter’s in about 50, and new social networks tend to launch exclusively in one language. Even relatively substantial national languages, like Icelandic, are becoming displaced by English and a handful of other languages with big internet presences, and those that don’t have government funding behind them are doing even worse. Unfortunately, the versions of these statistics that I included in the first draft of this chapter in 2016 had barely changed when I updated them in early 2020. The momentum for making the internet hospitable to every language is slowing where it should be increasing. Nonetheless, users are still figuring out ways to communicate online: people who are illiterate or who speak languages that don’t have well-established writing systems or autocomplete tools are among the highest users of voice texting, or sending five- to thirty-second audio clips through chat apps.

Our collective societal relationship to technologically mediated communication is also changing. At the moment, there’s still a generation gap. But the gap isn’t really about whether you know what the acronyms stand for or which buttons to press: it’s about whether you dismiss the expressive capacity of informal writing or whether you assume it. As an older person who’d recently been told that ending a text with a period made them sound annoyed told me, “They know I’m old! Why would anyone assume I know how to communicate something that subtle in a text?” All three generations of Internet People assume that everyone is constantly communicating subtle emotional signals in text, even if there’s some minor disagreement about exactly which subtleties mean what. Getting an Internet Person to stop overthinking a text message is just as impossible as getting people of any age to stop reading emotional nuances from tone of voice. We can’t help it.

But relatively soon, there will no longer be any people left who aren’t internet people, at least not at a generational level, not in major world languages.