Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

smiley face might be used in a context like “I’m looking for some suggestions :)”—you might be anxious rather than happy about requesting feedback, but you’re using the smiley to make the request more polite.

we can add strategic pauses and vocal inflections, we can rely on our shared knowledge of context, and we can gesture.

If we say instead that people are consciously using them to guide their readers to the correct interpretation of their words, then emoticons become a positive, helpful, social behavior, a way of saying, “I want to clarify my true intentions for you.”

It’s not the more negative behavior of putting on a mask.

It’s not so much that every emoji has a direct analogue in gesture; it’s that we can use them both to accomplish similar communicative goals.

“Yesterday we were talking about pancake day, so I just sent some pancakes [an emoji] and that kind of just, finished the conversation. It kind of just, yeah I think it says you have nothing else to say.”

Emoji didn’t succeed because they were a language, they succeeded because they’re not a language. Rather than try to compete with words on their home turf, emoji added in a whole new system to represent a whole other layer of meaning. We already had a way of representing individual sounds, in the form of letters, and we’ve been developing the system for representing tone of voice using our existing punctuation and capitalization that we talked about in the previous chapter. So emoji and other pictorial elements are filling the third important pillar of communication: a way of representing our gestures and physical space.

These social phrases are known as phatic expressions, and their meaning is more about the context you say them in than the sum of their individual words. “How’s it going?” and “What’s up?” have the same function: they both acknowledge the presence of someone you already know in a way that’s slightly more elaborate than a simple greeting (“Hi!”) but doesn’t go so far as to be an original conversation.

One such shift happened as a result of the telephone. The greetings popular in the 1800s were based on knowing who you were addressing and when you were addressing them: “Good morning, children.” “Good afternoon, Doctor.” But when you pick up a ringing telephone, you have no idea who’s calling (during the many decades before caller ID), and you can’t even be sure whether you share a time of day with them.

Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Someone born in 2000 could justifiably point out that “hey” has been used as a greeting for their entire life, while someone born in 1950 could, equally justifiably, say, “But I don’t feel greeted by ‘hey,’ I feel summoned!”

although much sociolinguistic research finds that the way you talk is pretty much established by late adolescence, Sankoff finds that some speakers may keep changing well into middle age, especially for formal and prestigious bits of language.

“Dear” is our last relic of what used to be an elaborate system of greetings that describe people in flattering terms, which was popular for well over a millennium.

For example, founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr exchanged a series of letters in 1804 which all closed with “I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,” but culminated with them fighting a duel.

It would be easy to attribute the shift in greetings to a broader shift in society: the adjectival greetings could be a bid for affection; the summoning greetings a bid for attention. But such an association is too easy and I think it’s simply wrong. It’s better to realize that greetings are generally phatic: that we pick a particular greeting because that’s what we’re used to, and to acknowledge that we’ve always wanted both affection and attention.

But conversation analysts find that actually we don’t pause much, any more than we normally pause between each word. If I ask you a question and you don’t start answering immediately, I’ll probably treat it as a break in communication. Even if just 0.2 seconds go by, I’m likely to repeat the question again, try a different way of phrasing it, or switch languages (to the eternal bane of would-be polyglots).

(If you’ve ever found yourself unable to get a word in edgewise, or doing all the talking around someone frustratingly taciturn, it’s probably because your cultural timings are ever so slightly miscalibrated for each other, points out the linguist Deborah Tannen.)

Conversation analysts find that “interruptions” aren’t randomly distributed in conversation: instead, they’re at points when it seems like the main speaker could be finished talking but it turns out they aren’t.

In face-to-face conversation, a syllable or two of overlap is nothing terrible (humans are good at associating words with the locations of specific people), and we sort out most such confusions without thinking much of it. In conversations mediated by technology, overlaps can be a bigger problem. Walkie-talkies don’t allow overlaps at all, so guessing becomes painful and people instead say “over” at the end of a turn.

We’ve added new features on top (like better graphics support and the “is typing” indicator), but at their core, chat conversations still consistently happen in a stream, and with a high tolerance for multiple, interwoven message threads.

We can read faster than we can speak, and reading also lets us glance back and check something again, which means that writing naturally supports longer and more complex sentences:

if you compare an essay and the transcript of a famous speech, the essay will have more subordinate clauses, while the speech will have more repetition. (If you’ve ever been forced to listen to a novice public speaker read an essay out loud, it’s not your fault you found it hard to follow.)

with chat, the audience is known and the time horizon is fast. The other person can literally see that you’re typing, so it’s better to just get something out there than worry about composing the perfect message.

soccer issue that already contained six other comments. When the previous comments were hostile and aggressive, so was the new one. When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit—and it didn’t matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts.

What was unique about the memes that took off was not the in-jokes, but the scale: in a world where in-jokes happen all the time and distribution costs are zero, a few of them can get really big because their in-groups are actually very large, like “people who use the internet,” “people who agree that this particular cat looks very grumpy,” or “people who saw the previous very popular in-joke.”

How is it that we have a college student in 2014 claiming that memes are dead and, three meme-filled years later, a different college freshman claiming that the students only a year older don’t truly understand memes? (Both students were mere children during Peak Lolcat in 2007, and neither of them was even born when Mike Godwin started seeding counter-Nazi memes on Usenet in 1990, if we want to really put our harrumphing hats on.)

It doesn’t make sense if we think of memes as a single, unified phenomenon.

If we think of memes as a claim on internet culture, things become clearer. Memes periodically shift away from one of their founder populations. Those particular memes, to that particular group, are indeed dead. But as long as people are creating culture on the internet, a different group will emerge with a different format to take up the mantle of “meme.”

spectacular reimagining, that I laugh the hardest. Memes are full of stock characters.

crossed my Twitter feed while I was supposed to be writing.) The Library of Congress archives memes now, preserving things like the Lolcat Bible, Urban Dictionary, and Know Your Meme. It calls them, charmingly and also not entirely inaccurately, “folklore.”

Limor Shifman provides a tantalizing clue: she did a study of YouTube videos that spawned many imitations compared with videos that had the same number of views but few or no imitations. Surprisingly, she found that the more professional-looking videos were less likely to be memed. In Shifman’s words: “‘Bad’ texts make ‘good’ memes.” Or in other words, since memes are based on active involvement, “The ostensibly unfinished, unpolished, amateur-looking, and even weird video invites people to fill in the gaps, address the puzzles, or mock its creator.”

The stylized language signals their genre, the same way as “once upon a time” or “knock knock” signals a fairy tale or a knock-knock joke.

You can do it yourself: make a sentence containing an animal that would be unwise to keep as a pet, a verb with at least two syllables, a color or texture that you’re wearing, and something nonwearable in your immediate environment. Your odds are really good that no one’s ever said it before. But you don’t even have to go surreal: try googling in quotation marks the last message you texted that was longer than ten words. You’ll probably get zero hits.

A language with people but no books is a living language that can always create books, but a language with books and no people exists only in pale, shadowed, ghostly form.

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

if children had to copy exactly how their parents spoke in order for language to be transmitted, language would be brittle and fragile.