More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Early visualizations of cyberspace thought we might want to manipulate three-dimensional figurines of ourselves in order to interact with each other in virtual space. But it turned out, what we really wanted was less about dressing up our avatars in fanciful digital clothing and more about conveying what we’re thinking and feeling.
We no longer accept that writing must be lifeless, that it can only convey our tone of voice roughly and imprecisely, or that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals. We’re creating new rules for typographical tone of voice. Not the kind of rules that are imposed from on high, but the kind of rules that emerge from the collective practice of a couple billion social monkeys—rules that enliven our social interactions.
women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.
Men tend to follow a generation later: in other words, women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.
I’ve also included a substantial proportion of absolute time references rather than relative ones, aiming to be precise about whether I think something is true of the early twenty-first century, the 2010s, a specific year, and so on, rather than saying “now” or “currently” and requiring readers to flip to the copyright page
Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them by switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling words. All our texting and tweeting is making us better at expressing ourselves in writing.
No one who writes “u” does it because they’re unaware that “you” is an option. A literacy study by Michelle Drouin and Claire Davis points out that the idea that textisms might interfere with our ability to produce the formal standard just doesn’t fit with what we know about how memory works.
If we were going to forget any part of language, it would be the rare, two-dollar words like “grandiloquent” or “sedulous” that we memorize with flashcards for the sake of a test, not the short words we learned as tiny children and keep encountering every day in both their abbreviated and non-abbreviated forms.
only 2.4 percent of the actual teens’ messages were slang. (I’m reminded of the surveys of perception
Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline one?
the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones.
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.
The changeability of language is its strength: if children had to copy exactly how their parents spoke in order for language to be transmitted, language would be brittle and fragile. It would be losable, the way that ancient techniques for art or architecture can be lost. But because we remake language at every generation, because we learn it from our peers, not just our elders, because we can make ourselves understood even though we all speak subtly different personal varieties, language is flexible and strong.
