Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

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.

Keysmashing may be shifting, though: I’ve noticed a second kind, which looks more like “gbghvjfbfghchc” than “asafjlskfjlskf,” from thumbs mashing against the middle of a smartphone keyboard.

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.

The internet was the final key in this process that had begun with medieval scribes and modernist poets—it made us all writers as well as readers.

the West Coast liked the Britishy “bollocks” and “bloody.”

Instead, they adopted linguistic features linked to intellectualism, such as hypercareful articulation, long words, and puns.

despite the fact that it’s technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an easier time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers.