I’m a linguist. I live on the internet.
Like many linguists, I can’t quite turn
that linguist part of my brain off. So, when
I see the boundless variety of informal language
flowing past me on the internet when I’m
checking my phone before I even get out of
bed every morning – like many of us – I
can’t help thinking, even when I’m not
quite awake yet, “I wonder how it works.”
What bits about language change are unique
to the internet and what bits might’ve happened
regardless? Because the English of this year
was never gonna be the same as the English
of a 100 years ago, even if none of this technology
stuff had ever happened, what is it that makes
the internet a specific and unique place for
language to happen? What is it that makes
internet language unique?
How many people are face with tears of joy?
I think a few years ago you would’ve gotten
a lot more people for face with tears of joy,
and then it’s been kind of gradually getting
staler. There was a period of about a year
when it was like “Ah, yeah. Lol is on the
wane. I gotta use face with tears of joy!
That’ll be my refreshing way of saying ‘I’m
laughing.’” Yeah, no. Hello? 2015 called,
and it wants its joy back.
Something that I think is really important
to remember about internet communication and
communication in general is that it’s often
a lot less haphazard than we believe it is.
When we see other people doing things with
communication that we don’t understand,
it’s tempting to believe they just don’t
know what they’re doing. It’s tempting
to believe that when we don’t understand
the motives, or we don’t understand why
someone’s communicating a particular sort
of way, that it’s because they just don’t
know what’s going on or they’re not following
the right way that we’re used to. But, in
many cases, people are doing this because
it meets a need for them, because it’s useful
for them, and it accomplishes something useful
that they wanna do.
We often talk about writing as a thing of
books, and newspapers, and edited prose, and
paragraphs, and sentences, and this type of
thing. We often talk about speaking as a thing
of conversation, of back and forth, of informality,
of interruptions, and hesitations, and pauses,
and all of these things that make it very
lively. What we miss when we’re doing this
is that there’s a different kind of speaking,
and it’s the kind that I’m doing right
now. I don’t go home and talk to my dog
like this. For one thing, my dog doesn’t
understand PowerPoint. And for another thing,
I don’t have a dog.
Who here would say L-O-L probably most of
the time? Okay. Who here would say “lol”
probably most of the time? You’ve got about
50/50. This is great. There’s a kind of
true cross section of internet people here.
Now you know who your enemies are. Feel free
to take them out once we get to the drinks.
If you’re trying to be informal about your
writing and you’re trying to show that you’re
not standing on ceremony by committing to
whether you’re writing a full clause or
a dependent clause – because honestly, maybe
you don’t wanna bother thinking about this.
When we’re having a conversation, we don’t
think about, “Man, is this sentence that’s
coming out of my mouth right now a full clause
or a dependent clause?” That’s a thing
that kinda gets imposed later on the writing.
If you’re in a relatively informal context
and you don’t wanna commit to this, but
you do still have this sort of imaginary English
teacher in your head telling you, “Oh, no!
Watch out for those periods and those commas!”
you might say to yourself, “I have an escape
route.” And this is that there are a couple
punctuation marks that people use both for
dependent and independent clauses. They are
the "dot dot dot" and the dash. You might
say to yourself, “If I just use one of these,
then I can join my clauses. I show that I’m
casual. I’m not standing on ceremony. I’m
participating in this informal written genre.
I don’t have to think, maybe, a little bit
as hard by using these punctation marks.”
You can make a sentence right now, with your
brain that speaks English, that has never
been said before in the entirety of human
history – that is not found in any of those
books. It’s not even hard. If you go back
to your last text message that was more than
10 words – and wasn’t a stock phrase like
“Pleased to meet you,” you know, “See
you at five,” but literally any sentence
that’s more than 10, 15 words – and you
type that into Google with quotes around it,
no one else will have said this on the internet.
You can try it. You can do this with your
last text message or last email – the last
thing you wrote – even if it seems pretty
boring. If it’s fairly long, no one has
said this. We are constantly saying sentences
that no one’s ever said before.
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