More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 9 - May 6, 2021
We learned to read a formal kind of language which pretends that the past century or two of English hasn’t really happened,
It takes about an hour of skilled human work per minute of audio recording to get speech into a transcript usable for linguistic analysis:
It’s hard to do at a massive scale.
True about many things
An even more extreme example comes in how English speakers smooth out “I do not know.” We’ve been saying it out loud for generations, long enough for it to have worn down to “I don’t know,” “I dunno,” and even a simple triplet “uh-huh-uh” or “mm-hm-mm” to the low-high-low melody of “I dunno.” “I dunno” is easier to articulate than “I do not know,” but it’s not really much shorter to write (even though we sometimes write it to evoke speech). The melodic triple hum is exceedingly easy to produce (you can even do it with a mouthful of sandwich) but not efficient at all in writing, requiring a
...more
The internet was the final key in this process that had begun with medieval scribes and modernist poets—it made us all writers as well as readers.
Whatever else is changing for good or for bad in the world, the continued evolution of language is neither the solution to all our problems nor the cause of them. It simply is.
when young people start using social media: age thirteen, if you believe the terms of service of most sites and apps, or slightly younger, if you assume that some users lie about their ages.
But every generation has talked slightly differently from its parents: otherwise, we’d all still be talking like Shakespeare. The question is, how much of that is influenced by technology, and how much is the linguistic evolution that would have happened regardless?
people are more open to new vocabulary during the first third of their lifespan,
Researchers are part of society, and as a society, we’re more likely to be worried about teen slang than about parents adding new terms to the familect or businesspeople adopting new corporate buzzwords.
was a genre difference: men were more likely to write topic-based blogs and women more likely to write diary-style blogs.
Instead, we get our social linguistic cues from the people and power dynamics around us.
It was like a competition to see who could be the most uptight.
Even after years of writing, most of us have a hard time trusting what we naturally think sounds like a reasonable English sentence, haunted as we are by the ghosts of misguided grammarians.
Tools like spellcheck, grammarcheck, autocomplete, and speech-to-text impose someone’s ideas of the rules of English automatically—invisible authorities that we can defy but not avoid.
“Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.
reserve “cyberspace” for jocular historical use.)
Thank you!
No more are certain ways of speaking inherently inferior. Could we not put our tremendous computing power (both human and mechanical) to better use than upholding the prejudices of a bunch of aristocrats from the eighteenth century?
Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering America despite the millions of people who already lived there.
Literature favors a few elite languages and dialects, even though there are around seven thousand languages in the world and at least half of the world’s population speaks more than one language.
In psychological terms, shortcuts are for ideas that we’ve overlearned.
asleep. If we were going to forget any part of language, it would be the rare, two-dollar words like “grandiloquent” or “sedulous” that we memorize with flashcards for the sake of a test, not the short words we learned as tiny children and keep encountering every day in both their abbreviated and non-abbreviated forms.
They found that the teens weren’t actually using internet slang all that much. Unlike examples from hyperbolic articles, where almost every word is replaced with slang (r u gna b on teh interwebz l8r?),
Internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language.
paper analyzing the effects of spellcheck on writer’s block suggests that I may be onto something: instantly appearing red squiggles may seem helpful, but for complex documents, they pull writers away from the overall flow and make them think about small details too early.
The first year that marriages from internet dating were widely reported was 1995, which means that children born of the first internet-mediated relationships are—at least hypothetically—now old enough to internet date and have kids of their own. Internet grandbabies! Pretty much the opposite of “alienating and unfulfilling.”
critical review of the evidence for and against digital natives describes it as a myth, “the academic equivalent of a ‘moral panic.’” That is, when a group or activity is perceived to be a threat to society, but sensationalist media is far more prominent than any actual evidence for it.
“We should change ‘lol’ to ‘ne’ (nose exhale), because that’s all we really do when we see something funny online.”
Truth
Pre Internet People share some commonalities with Post Internet People, who came online around the same time. They’ve both never really known an internet without Facebook and YouTube and wifi and touchscreens, and they’re both disproportionately likely to be using their family members’ cast-off electronics.
if the app changes its interface,
If? rofl
Pre Internet People do not accept the internet as a legitimate source of social influence—they’re
“this suggests that one should interpret observed differences in digital sociability between younger and older users as life-stage related, rather than as indicating an ongoing change in the direction of increased sociability for all digital media users.”
“Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.” Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with
...more
Rather, “computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.”
no generation anywhere has ever mastered the skills of adulthood without mentorship.
So if you’re writing informally and you don’t want to bother deciding whether your string of words is a full sentence or merely a clausal fragment, one way to split the difference is to punctuate ambiguously—to use an ellipsis or dash.
The added weight of the period is a natural way to talk about weighty matters.
But in an ordinary conversation, we don’t speak in full sentences, and we especially don’t round them all off with a distinct fall. (“And now over to: The Weather.”) Instead, we speak in utterances, and our intonation is neither rising nor falling: by default, it’s flat or trailing off, like a dot dot dot or an unpunctuated linebreak.
But when a printing press was the easiest means of reaching a large audience, edited and formal punctuation became the main kind that people saw.
writing needs to be intuitive, easy to create, and practically as fast as thinking or speaking. We drew these requirements together to create a system of typographical tone of voice.
Why would anyone suddenly switch to all caps on a computer?
The curse of the accidental caps lock
In the written version, there were fewer polite hedges overall, which looks at first as if people are simply blunter when typing: bring on the flamewars!
the people who typed the most words also produced a significantly higher ratio of polite ones.
make an extra effort, using hedges, honorifics, or simply more words:
to indicate that you’re on the same side and don’t have to stand on ceremony:
It’s well established that politeness decreases with power—you’re more polite to your boss than to your underling.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the average internet person no longer knows how to code, and so code-based internet slang remains limited to Old Internet People and techy subcultures of later generations.
Who hasn’t reproduced a line from a song or movie while imitating its original intonation? Inconceivable!
Nice #TPB ref
If we wanted to make all our messages completely lucid, we already have a very effective tool for that, and it’s called Not Being Sarcastic.
That commenter and I are not alone: people now communicate in this ironic dance every minute of every day. We succeeded, in fact, precisely because we’re not alone, because we’re not solitary intellectuals writing up abstract proposals for ironic punctuation, but social people trying our damnedest, paying attention to how our messages will be read, extending the grace of assuming that the other is also choosing their typography with intent. We succeeded because our linguistic norms were both oriented towards the social internet rather than the prescriptive red pen.
