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July 27 - August 24, 2021
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.
some twelve-year-olds swear, but a lot more sixteen-year-olds do. But swearing is very socially salient (we have laws about it!) and not really changing that much. It’s been peaking in adolescence and declining through adulthood for decades.
people are more open to new vocabulary during the first third of their lifespan, regardless of whether that’s an eighty-year lifespan in an offline community or a three-year “lifespan” in an online one.
women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.
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.
“Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.
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.
Internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language.
instantly appearing red squiggles may seem helpful, but for complex documents, they pull writers away from the overall flow and make them think about small details too early.
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 distinctive accents in regions like Boston and Virginia can be traced to founding populations of British settlers from particular regions.
(the acronym UTSL for “use the source, Luke!” a Star Wars–ian way of suggesting that people read the source code before asking questions about it).
I thought RTFM was harsh...
for the internet users who joined in order to hang out with people they already knew, screennames were a way of performing identity, rather than obscuring it:
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 (albeit a kind of “maturity” that involved posting photos of people drinking warm beer out of red plastic cups).
unlike for Old Internet People, there’s barely any relationship between how well a Full Internet Person can socialize via computers and how well they can talk to the computer itself. The first car drivers were all skilled mechanics, because the vehicles broke down so regularly, but as cars became mainstream, they needed to be drivable even by people who didn’t know an oil pump from a carburetor. As computers, too, became usable even by people who’d never “looked under the hood,” the relationship between tech skills and internet socialization loosened—a
sociability is highest among teenagers and young adults, and declines as people get older.
Social and technological savvy online were virtually the same for Old Internet People and still loosely linked for Full and Semi Internet People, but they’ve become completely decoupled for the Post cohort. This defies predictions that digital natives would pick up technological skills as easily as speaking. Rather, “computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.”
The dot dot dot is especially perilous. For people with experience of informal writing offline, it’s a generic separation character, as we just saw. But for internet-oriented writers, the generic separator is the linebreak or new message, which has left the dot dot dot open to taking on a further meaning of something left unsaid.
Formal writing gets help along the way: you can take time to revise it and enlist other people to edit. But informal writing happens in near-real time: not only does this make it hard to go through multiple drafts, but you also need to express your emotions in writing while you’re still in the grip of them. Even the most professional of writers can’t use all their handy tools and tricks when the other person can see that you’ve started typing into the chat box.
The added weight of the period is a natural way to talk about weighty matters.
Just as a question mark can indicate a rising intonation even without a question (Like so?), the period can indicate a falling intonation even when it’s not serving to end a statement (Like. So.). When I put on a newscaster voice, I deliver every sentence with falling intonation. Solemnly. Portentously. But in an ordinary conversation, we don’t speak in full sentences, and we especially don’t round them all off with a distinct fall.
One important medieval punctuation mark was the punctus, a dot which was placed in the location of the modern comma for a short breath, midway through the line for a medium breath, and up around the position of the apostrophe for a long breath.
She found that all caps made people judge happy messages as even happier (IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!!! feels happier than “It’s my birthday!!!”) but didn’t make sad messages any sadder (“i miss u” is just as sad as I MISS U). When it came to anger, the results were mixed: sometimes caps increased the anger rating and sometimes it didn’t, a result which Heath attributed to the difference between “hot” anger (FIGHT ME) and “cold” anger (“fight me”).
a question is rhetorical or ironic by asking it without a question mark.
Irony is a linguistic trust fall.
Not signaling all one’s emotions with overt punctuation can be a sign of faith that someone won’t take things the wrong way, because we’re already friends or we’re part of the same speech community—or
the expanded system of conveying emotional nuance through text we’ve come up with instead is so nuanced and idiosyncratic that if I’m typing a personal sort of communication for someone—say, when I’m in the passenger’s seat and a text on the driver’s phone needs to be replied to right away—I find I need to inquire in great detail how exactly they want me to type. Period, exclamation mark, or simple linebreak at the end of the utterance? How much capitalization? Do any letters need to be repeated?
When researchers show East Asian and Western Caucasian people photos of faces displaying different emotions, the Asian participants tend to make conclusions about the emotions based on what people are doing with their eyes, whereas the Western participants look to the mouth to read emotions. This tendency is reflected in the different conventions for portraying emotions in manga and anime versus Western cartoons, and it shows up again in the stylized faces of emoticons and kaomoji. Happy :) and sad :( emoticons can have the same eyes but must have different mouths, whereas happy ^_^ and sad
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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”),
sending messages back and forth can be a way of digitally hanging out: even when your messages have barely any textual meaning, they convey an important subtext: “I want to be talking with you.”
The two most prominent solutions were “Hello,” championed by Thomas Edison, and “Ahoy,” championed by Alexander Graham Bell.
Our modern, Western notion that authorship should be solo and original is comparatively young and culturally bound, dating back only to after we had the ability to make faithful and exact copies at a mass scale. Copyright started evolving into its modern form in the centuries after the invention of the printing press made copying easy. In other words, we’ve had the right to adapt longer than we’ve had the right to prevent copying.
Every atlas eventually becomes a history book,
