Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

When future historians look back on this era, they’ll find our changes just as fascinating as we now find innovative words from Shakespeare or Latin or Norman French. So let’s adopt the perspective of these future historians now, and explore the revolutionary period in linguistic history that we’re living through from a place of excitement and curiosity.

It’s not an accident that Twitter, where you’re encouraged to follow people you don’t already know, has given rise to more linguistic innovation (not to mention memes and social movements) than Facebook, where you primarily friend people you already know offline.

If we all woke up tomorrow and decided that every single vowel sounded better with an R after it, we could make it happen. (Ermargerd, whart ar world thart wourld ber.)

It is perhaps ironic that this Full Internet generation, the first to use the internet to baffle their parents collectively, is also the last to be baffled by their own children.

Full Internet People have some nostalgia for earlier technology and some insecurity about whether they’ve lost touch with what younger people are doing online, but they’re well adapted to both social networking sites and professional electronic communication.

“We should change ‘lol’ to ‘ne’ (nose exhale), because that’s all we really do when we see something funny online.”

The difference between how people communicate in the internet era boils down to a fundamental question of attitude: Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline one?

What’s cool about expressive lengthening is that, although it started as a very literal representation of longer sounds, it’s ended up creating a form of emotional expression that now has no possible spoken equivalent, making it more akin to its typographical cousins, all caps and italics.

when you say a word like “sooooo” with a sing-song sarcastic inflection, the pitch of your voice literally rises, then falls, then rises slightly again. In other words, your intonation makes the shape of a tilde.

gifs become a kind of emotional currency, a way of sending someone a tiny zap of positive feeling.

As The New York Times put it in a tweet about AIM closing down for good in 2017, “~* iT’s ThE eNd Of An ErA *~.”

Many of your Facebook friends, Twitter people, or Instagram folks remain surface-level acquaintances, but adding someone on social media is a way of adding them to the hallway you stroll down, a way of saying, “I might like to have more unplanned interactions with you, and we can see where things go from there.”

popular posts tended to strike a balance between somewhat obscure but not too cryptic—in-jokes and references that appealed strongly to a distinct subset of people.

A meme in the internet sense isn’t just something popular, a video or image or phrase that goes viral. It’s something that’s remade and recombined, spreading as an atom of internet culture.

The meme is not dead: it’s reborn.

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