Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

We learned to write with a paralyzing fear of red ink and were taught to worry about form before we even got to consider what we wanted to say, as if good writing were a thing of mechanistic rule-picking rather than of grace and verve.

What’s unique about adolescence, then, may not be our susceptibility to linguistic trends. Rather, it’s the last time that a whole population is entering a new social group all at once.

As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

the first English printers imported their presses from Continental Europe, where no one used the English letter þ (thorn), so English printers substituted either the “th” letter sequence (which won out in most places) or the similar-looking letter “y” (which survives in a few limited contexts like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe).

Studies note that post-internet teens aren’t drinking as much or having as much sex, because their hangouts happen in virtual space rather than in cars or on street corners.