Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

dictionaries are records of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using—we

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

while a book is always telling your hands how many pages it has left, an internet device is a portal to a universe bigger than you can fathom.

When we know language as a network, we realize that any portrait of it is incomplete, and that’s a marvelous thing.

the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones.

When we study only formal language, we see through this tiny pinhole into what English can do. When we study informal language, we open our minds wide. We step out of the library and see the complexity of the wide world that surrounds us.

Our collective societal relationship to technologically mediated communication is also changing. At the moment, there’s still a generation gap. But the gap isn’t really about whether you know what the acronyms stand for or which buttons to press: it’s about whether you dismiss the expressive capacity of informal writing or whether you assume it.

I’ve avoided referring to things that aren’t online as “real life.” The internet has become real life. Popular culture and internet culture overlap more often than they diverge.

While the internet is often a means for spreading new words, that doesn’t mean it’s always the cause of them.

Language has existed with or without all kinds of technology—writing, agriculture, aqueducts, electricity, industrialization, automobiles, airplanes, cameras, photocopiers, televisions—and the internet is no exception. In fact, language’s only known predator is other people: many languages have been stamped out or imposed on others through war or conquest.

When we thought of language like a book, perhaps it was natural that we were worried and careful about what we enshrined in it. But now that we can think of language like the internet, it’s clear that there is space for innovation, space for many Englishes and many other languages besides, space for linguistic playfulness and creativity.