Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Perfectly following a list of punctuation rules may grant me some kinds of power, but it won’t grant me love. Love doesn’t come from a list of rules—it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other.

Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.