Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

a baseline, a normal kind of communication from which any deviation has an emotional impact. In speech, our baseline is the utterance—a burst of language bounded by pauses or interruptions. Sometimes an utterance corresponds to a full sentence; sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time an utterance is a string of words, but sometimes we even cut ourselves off in the middle of one (for examp—). Talking exclusively in complete sentences sounds stilted in all but the most formal of prepared speeches. (Sentence fragments! How useful!) We use utterances in casual writing as well. For people whose linguistic norms are oriented to the internet, the most neutral way of indicating an utterance is with a new line or message break.

One year of research and the best explanation of 'utterance' was on my kindle

Multiple exclamation marks were considered part of an early internet slang known as leetspeak, which featured numbers and other special characters substituting for similar-looking letters, such as 1337 for “leet,” or “1 4m l33t h4x0r!” for “I am an elite hacker!” and incorporated common typos such as “teh” for “the” and “pwn” for “own.” The common typo for the exclamation mark was the number 1, since English keyboards typically place these two symbols on the same key. The typo !!!!1!11! was then parodied by writing out “one” and “eleven” as full words: !!!one!!eleventy!! Leetspeak and multiple exclamation marks were genuine indicators of computer proficiency and excitement, respectively, in the netspeak of the 1980s and 90s, but both gradually became ironic through continued use.

Rather, like how a food historian might use a historical figure’s diatribe against broccoli to establish that broccoli was indeed being eaten in a particular place at a particular time, the linguistic forms that people complain about can tell us which linguistic forms were becoming popular when. No one bothers with tirades against vegetables they’ve never heard of or words they’ve never encountered.

Yus. Exactly.

Irony is a linguistic trust fall. When I write or speak with a double meaning, I fall backwards, hoping that you’ll be there to catch me. The risks are high: misaimed irony can gravely injure the conversation. But the rewards are high, too: the sublime joy of feeling purely understood, the comfort of knowing someone’s on your side. No wonder people through the ages kept trying so hard to write it.

After all, a red pen will never love me back. 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. When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love. But for all the subtle vocal modulations that typography can express, we’re not just voices.

When I’ve tried to articulate the appeal of Linguist Twitter to linguists who aren’t on it, I’ve talked in terms of hallways: You know how the best part of a conference is the hallway? Imagine if you could have that hallway available at any time of the day or night! But perhaps I should have talked in terms of third places.

#TerminallyOnline

The most famous of these was Blinkenlights, a mock-German warning to stick on the wall above any fancy equipment saying that it “ist nicht für der gefingerpoken und mittengraben. . . . Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.”