Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Like how money is just squiggles on paper or on a screen until it determines whether you can eat lunch, words are just meat twitches until they determine whether you can get a job—or whether someone will even deign to tell you where the shoe section is.

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

You’re likely to already share a certain rapport (not to mention the same physical space) with anyone you’re leaving a sticky note for, and even so, a look through scans of dozens of notes that people have left for their family members or roommates shows that people often sign them with a heart or smiley face or “xo.” It’s hardly a coincidence that our repertoire of upbeat, sociable typography expanded precisely when we needed it to build near-real-time relationships with unseen others.

Someone commented that they’d been about to send me something that I’d actually written myself before they put two and two together and realized we were the same person. I replied, without thinking too much about it, “my Brand is Strong”—a few people acknowledged the humor, and that was that. Later, I got to thinking about it. I realized that I’d replied from my phone, but I’d had to go to extra effort in order to do so. If I hadn’t been able to override my phone’s default formatting—if I’d had to type “My brand is strong.” rather than “my Brand is Strong”—my irony could have been read as sincere arrogance. I can’t see that phrase with default capitalization and not want to wipe that smarmy grin off someone’s face: there’s no way I’m going to let it issue from my own. Of course, I could have typed something else that was sincere and non-smarmy using formal typography. But the irony gains me something here: with ironic capitals on the “brand” part, I align myself with internet people, all facing the same weird pressures of social media on our self-presentation. With minimalist lowercase at the beginning, I make myself approachable: like a self-deprecating joke at the beginning of a public speech, I remove myself from the position of being able to lecture others about their writing style by preemptively adopting features that someone else might lecture me for. At one level, I acknowledge that it’s true, the other person has heard of me, but at the same time, I defuse the awk...

Less often do we consider the importance of time, the fact that CU L8R and #E m p h a s i s™ belong to very different eras of internetspeak.

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.

“I seeded Godwin’s Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it—the counter-meme was reproducing on its own!” A few years later, he described his experiment in an article for Wired, invoking Dawkins’s term to describe what he’d been doing and thereby introducing Wired’s readers to the term “meme” in a specifically internet context.

The words “text” and “textile” have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, “to weave.”

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.