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July 27 - August 31, 2019
We learned to read a formal kind of language which pretends that the past century or two of English hasn’t really happened, which presents words and books to us cut off from the living people who created them, which downplays the alchemy of two people tossing thoughts back and forth in perfect balance.
Even keysmash, that haphazard mashing of fingers against keyboard to signal a feeling so intense that you can’t possibly type real words, has patterns. A typical keysmash might look like “asdljklgafdljk” or “asdfkfjas;dfI”—quite distinct from, say, a cat walking across the keyboard, which might look like “tfgggggggggggggggggggsxdzzzzzzzz.”*
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.
You never truly step into the same English twice.
familects: “the private and personal word-creations that are found in every household and in every social group, but which never get into the dictionary”
The role that young women play as language disruptors is so clearly established at this point it’s practically boring to linguists who study this topic:
Men tend to follow a generation later: in other words, women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.
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.
It was like a competition to see who could be the most uptight. Lowth gave us an early suggestion against the sentence-ending preposition: “This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.”
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.
Media representations of chatspeak ring hollow when they borrow the exotic trappings (like “lol” and “ttyl”) without acknowledging the linguistic expertise that it takes to navigate the system as a whole (the coexistence of “lol” and “heheh,” or “shall” and “i’ll”).
Twitter users in particular often note that the character limits and instant, utterance-level feedback of the tweet format have forced them to learn how to structure their thoughts into concise, pithy statements.
What the Old Internet People have in common is that they still probably conduct a fair bit of their social lives online, often having a long-standing pseudonym that they use everywhere and internet-first friends that they’ve known for longer than some of their meatspace friends. They’re the social internet users most likely to have never gotten or to have barely used Facebook, because for them the internet is a place to tap into a global community rather than reinforce a local one.
As far as internet facility goes, Full Internet People have some nostalgia for earlier technology and some insecurity about whether they’ve lost touch with what younger people are doing online, but they’re well adapted to both social networking sites and professional electronic communication.
I feel called out
But 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.
But it’s important to be cautious about any attempt at Divination By Teenager.
Another way to do emphasis online is by repeatingggggg letterrrrssss, especially for emotive words like “yayyyy” or “nooo.” Just like shouty capitals, the origins of this practice predate the internet by maanyyy years.
Even without being consciously aware of it, people were aiming to be polite just as soon as they had the typing skills to do so.
Online politeness also has real effects: Wikipedia administrators were more polite before they’d been elected as admins, back when they were simply normal editors—more polite, in fact, than their fellow editors who’d run for adminship and lost.
metacommentary—labels that add a note of irony instead of categorization.
Who hasn’t reproduced a line from a song or movie while imitating its original intonation? Inconceivable!
Why the tilde in particular? After all, asterisks are also a crucial part of the ~*~sparkle ecosystem~*~.
So I tried to pin it down more specifically, and nearly fell off my chair in excitement when it dawned on me: when you say a word like “sooooo” with a sing-song sarcastic inflection, the pitch of your voice literally rises, then falls, then rises slightly again. In other words, your intonation makes the shape of a tilde.
Glitchy, pixelated, and badly photoshopped internet art came back into popularity in an age of high-definition cameras and smooth Instagram filters, and so did the written equivalent: stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.
Irony is a linguistic trust fall.
IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.
We learn to write not for power, but for love.
Without realizing that either gestures or emoji were potentially systematic, a couple billion internet users had subconsciously, collectively, and spontaneously mapped the functions of the one onto the capacity of the other.
In an article called “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs,” Lauren Michele Jackson pointed out that black people are overrepresented in gifs used by nonblack people, especially those that show extreme emotion. She linked this stereotype to the exaggerated acting of minstrel shows and scholar Sianne Ngai’s term “animatedness” to describe the long-standing tendency to see black people’s actions as hyperbolic.
The members of the Unicode Consortium had definitely not signed up to become the smiley faces people.
Chat is the perfect intersection of written and informal language.
It’s often observed that social media is taking on the functions of a hangout place for teenagers. 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.
A study of subtweets among college students found indirect posts were indeed considered a more socially acceptable way of conveying negative information than directly mentioning the person in question. (For example, “Thanks to a certain person for backstabbing and completely ruining my day. People like that are pathetic.” While people recognized the passive aggression, they preferred it to a version that named and shamed the specific person involved.) The inverse was the case for positive posts—it was considered better to tag someone directly in a post like “Thanks @RyanS for completely making
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A German study of hostility in comments on soccer blogs provides a potential reason why the Reddit ban worked. Researchers asked soccer fans to write a comment on a blog post about a controversial soccer issue that already contained six other comments. When the previous comments were hostile and aggressive, so was the new one. When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit—and it didn’t matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts.
A meme in the internet sense isn’t just something popular, a video or image or phrase that goes viral. It’s something that’s remade and recombined, spreading as an atom of internet culture.
The linguist Erin McKean tweeted a dialogue with her teenage son that illustrates this point: KID: fidget spinners are, like, a physical meme ME: THAT’S A FAD
*Linguist Llama says, “I wanna be a schwa. It’s never stressed.”
