Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

While there were a few keysmash purists, who posted whatever came out, I found that the majority of people will delete and remash if they don’t like what it looks like, plus a significant minority who will adjust a few letters. I also heard from several people who use the Dvorak keyboard, where the home row begins with vowels rather than ASDF, who reported that they just don’t bother keysmashing anymore at all because their layout makes it socially illegible.

English has a long history of verbalizing punctuation: think of “that’s the facts, period” or “these quote-unquote experts.” Or to take two examples from the 1890s, that dangerously modern decade: “He would not flinch one comma of the law” and “There was a very big question mark in [her] voice.” Spoken “hashtag” is just the latest in a long list of creative strategies to say without saying, add context, control the flow of information, or indicate that something is of more or less importance. In speech we also have options like the stage whisper, silly voices, putting on an accent, and speaking from behind your hand or with a different posture. Who hasn’t reproduced a line from a song or movie while imitating its original intonation? Inconceivable!

Irony, paradoxically, creates space for sincerity. If you and I can have the same web of complex attitudes towards one thing, then maybe we can also share more straightforward attitudes towards others. In this thread, irony did just that: the original poster replied again sincerely, thanking me for taking young people’s slang seriously. At first glance, it might seem like I hadn’t done that at all: Wasn’t the whole point of my reply that it was ironic? But at a deeper level, what I was taking seriously was aligning myself with the internet fluent, demonstrating such fluency myself, and signaling that I understood how vital it is to be able to convey a typographical tone of voice.

extending the grace of assuming that the other is also choosing their typography with intent.

Future eras may create ways of expressing meanings that are still more exquisite, making our current system of irony one day seem as blunt as a simple dot dot dot.

in any medium, irony requires trust.

Expressive typography makes electronic communication anything but impersonal. I, for one, think this change is fantastic. Even if this increased attention to typographical tone of voice did mean the decline of standard punctuation, I’d gladly accept the decline of standards that were arbitrary and elitist in the first place in favor of being able to better connect with my fellow humans. After all, a red pen will never love me back. Perfectly following a list of punctuation rules may grant me some kinds of power, but it won’t grant me love. Love doesn’t come from a list of rules—it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other. When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love.

When we thought of language like a book, perhaps it was natural that we were worried and careful about what we enshrined in it. But now that we can think of language like the internet, it’s clear that there is space for innovation, space for many Englishes and many other languages besides, space for linguistic playfulness and creativity. There’s space, in this glorious linguistic web, for you.