Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

language is a thing that lives in the minds of individual humans at individual points in time, a thing that can’t be fully encompassed in a static list of rules like a game of chess.

Conversation analysts find that “interruptions” aren’t randomly distributed in conversation: instead, they’re at points when it seems like the main speaker could be finished talking but it turns out they aren’t.

This is the STORY OF MY CONVERSATIONAL LIFE.

A network is not debased as it changes; its flexibility is a key part of its strength. So, too, is language enriched and made alive again for each subsequent generation as new connections grow and old ones wither away.

When we know language as a network, we realize that any portrait of it is incomplete, and that’s a marvelous thing.

A language with people but no books is a living language that can always create books, but a language with books and no people exists only in pale, shadowed, ghostly form. Johnson and his contemporaries found English “energetick without rules” by the standards of Latin because they were comparing a living language with a fossil.