Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

familects:

Nice word. I like it.

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: well-known sociolinguist William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change in a paper he wrote in 1990.

“Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.

What I’ve seen from several editors and lexicographers is the realization that we’re becoming trapped in a loop: dictionaries and writing manuals refer to edited prose in order to determine what is “standard” English, but the creators of such prose refer back to the same dictionaries and manuals in their editing, each waiting for the other to move first.

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.

I confess, I have recently been getting a kick out of deliberately replying to emails from people who don’t use exclamation marks without using any in return, rather than using one every other sentence, as is my usual practice for professional correspondence. At first, it felt stiff—was I now a cold-blooded crone?—but after a while, I started enjoying how it seemed to increase my gravitas. After all, why should I tolerate an inequitable distribution of the typographical emotional labor?

Passive-aggressively omitting exclamation marks at people is a new one on me.

Mock </sarcasm> code or #sarcasm hashtags require no explanation, fee, or font installation, and have indeed caught on to some extent, but both can be a trifle obvious. After all, the point of sarcasm is the double meaning, the innuendo, the sous-entendu. If we wanted to make all our messages completely lucid, we already have a very effective tool for that, and it’s called Not Being Sarcastic.

I can’t see that phrase with default capitalization and not want to wipe that smarmy grin off someone’s face:

Okay. I mean that seems like a weird reaction, but okay.

Many parents have told me about how their two- to five-year-old kids enjoy texting them messages full of dinosaur or animal emoji—but

Two-year-olds text?? omg