That Way We’re All Writing Now

https://medium.com/message/that-way-we-re-all-talking-now-49e255037f15

by bayonetz • 11 years ago

68 41 11 years ago

I liked this. Particularly:

I’m a fan of all the betentacled linguistic lifeforms that have emerged from our cambrian explosion online. These days, people write insanely more text than they did before the Internet and mobile phones came along. So the volume of experimentation is correspondingly massive and, for me, delightful. One joy of our age is watching wordplay evolve at the pace of E.coli.

and

Most of these syntax-morphing memes consist of us trying to find clever new ways to express our feelings.

The effect of image boards really is fascinating. What at first seemed to be childish screwing around is proving to be an amazing engine of new culture and language. such wow

musername2• 11 years ago

just as with many other online media, a lot of content is artificially constructed. The work going into wordplay and ironic remarks with potential for virality are not unlike what we have seen in marketing and media for a while, just at different scale.

pcl• 11 years ago

I'm assuming that when you say "artificially constructed," you mean that groups of people are sitting down and brainstorming according to some sort of master plan, which presumably looks something like:

1. Invent and popularize new grammar games

2. ???

3. Profit!

I've heard people bring up this angle before once or twice, but I really don't see where the profit would come from for many of the things that catch on.

Do you have any sources for your theory? Has anyone dug into it enough to find these [adjective] masterminds?

visakanv5• 11 years ago

Fair enough, though then you have to say that the Sophists artificially constructed their arguments, too. (Socrates was very against this.) And every sellout author since the origin of the printing press artificially constructed his or her books to appeal to the public. The news is artificially constructed– if it bleeds, it leads.

A lot of everything is "artificially constructed". The Beatles artificially constructed their songs.

Any sufficiently advanced "artificial construction" is indistinguishable from "organic construction".

justathrow2k6• 11 years ago

I'm not convinced its not any less childish screwing around just because it generates a shared vocabulary for people. It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang and in-jokes.

eropple• 11 years ago

I'm curious, have you ever read Shakespeare?

Because Shakespeare's slang and in-jokes are normal English today.

visakanv5• 11 years ago

I'm not convinced its not any less childish screwing around just because it generates a shared vocabulary for people. It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang and in-jokes.

Why not both? Culture and language "progresses" (progress implies linearity– might be more accurate to say "develops" or "unfolds") through slang and in-jokes!

Check out linguist John McWorther's work on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter

In fact it's quite interestingly parallel to how technology often starts out as toys and games (and instruments of war and pornography).

neltnerb• 11 years ago

Yeah, this is what I liked about it too. I like the idea of common English evolving on time scales at which it may legitimately become mutually incomprehensible over the course of my lifetime.

Language isn't static, and I love the idea of more versatile forms with fewer rules providing new generally accepted grammars for creative writing. I also like how this change in English seems to be fascinatingly in the direction of several Asian languages where sections are dropped if they are considered obvious enough. Although English has its own charms in having so much more flexibility in word ordering, it's not as succinct in allowing for dropped sections.

I'm afraid that people who get pissed off about the singular "they" or other such conventions are going to very rapidly be incapable of communicating with younger people at all. That's fascinating to think about.

Dewie2• 11 years ago

Usually you can quickly deduce what the missing part would be. Maybe it’s something like You, sadly, always know what to do when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” Or maybe the full sentence that emerges in your head is more convoluted, like Nothing is more bittersweet than reflecting on the challenges of dating someone who is superficially attractive but owns a pomeranian and thus, you worry, has all sorts of dog/partner priority issues, which you can instantly intuit when you’re using a dating app and see someone when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.”

Or: "That dog is cute (which is more than I can say for the owner)".

ArekDymalski• 11 years ago

I'm not an linguist but I got a feeling that 1337 speak wasn't created in last 15 years. Also it seems that the author got the historical parallel wrong because there's nothing puzzling about the complete phrase "Chapter IV In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Strange".

mytochar• 11 years ago

Often people separate the first half of that, though.

Chapter IV, titled, "In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Strange." is how I imagine many read that, especially when Chapter IV is in big letters, or even without the word "Chapter", like a title, with the rest of it in what would be recognized as a subtitle.

icebraining• 11 years ago

"In which (something happens)" was a common form when chapter titles were descriptions of the events in it, so it's fair to assume it was meant to refer to the chapter itself.

Later works often lampooned and subverted those tropes, of course.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chapter-history

tomjen3• 11 years ago

That makes more sense. I mean this is kind of a long chapter title, otherwise:

Oliver Becomes Better Acquainted with the Characters of His New Associates; and Purchases Experience at a High Price. Being a Short, but Very Important Chapter, in this History

That said I always kinda loved that way of writing.

vatys2• 11 years ago

Sure, Hackers came out in 1995. That's 20 years ago. And after that movie came out, if not before, using 1337 speak online was already a joke.

But the article did make the distinction that this is about the "mainstream internet". I kind of agree, but not completely.

For the first fifteen years of the mainstream Internet, the main way language changed was at the level of the individual word.

I guess the argument there is if the impact was solely on vocabulary at first, and is now starting to change grammar. I think an earlier example of internet grammar would be verbing a noun. It is certainly not unique to the internet, but I remember it being common online in the 90s. It struck me back then as a shift in language that was spreading more quickly online than offline.

vatys2• 11 years ago

It makes your feeling seem universal.

Rage comics, subordinate clauses, FML postings, tweets, anonymous comment threads, etc. The internet makes it easier to share the kind of tiny moments you'd never speak of. Then, suddenly, we all realized that we could all relate to them. Secret micro-shame revelation becomes a commonplace part of the modern human experience. Isn't the internet wonderful?

jacobolus• 11 years ago

One of my favorite things about XKCD is how willing Randall Munroe has been to share these kinds of trivial but intimate moments. I don’t think he would have been able to do it as a comic strip in any venue before the internet.

For instance, http://xkcd.com/245/

visakanv5• 11 years ago

"Trivial but intimate moments" – you'll enjoy a lot of novels written by old French and Russian authors. Check out Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground

SethMurphy• 11 years ago

It seems to me we are all learning to write click bait headlines. We are all morphing into personal SEO experts.

visakanv5• 11 years ago

Martin Luther effective did a tweetstorm with his 95 Theses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninety-Five_Theses

http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/95theses.htm

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

Maybe reddit isn't generating enough buzzfeed content so they want Facebook users to help too? :)

Jimmy• 11 years ago

It makes your feeling seem universal

It universalizes the feeling of the writer, not the reader. Much like religion or the Effective Altruism movement, the rise of homogenized communication (image macros, rage comics, the "that moment when..." style of writing), is yet another way of obtaining the pleasant feeling of subjugating your individuality to the Great Universal. This style of communication emphasizes what is common and easily digestible about an experience, rather than what is unique, particular, peculiar. The fact that the token experience varies from communication to communication - Tinder swipes one moment, getting your class canceled the next - is irrelevant. The only emotion communicated is one that has been felt a million times before by a million people.

The Culture Industry [1] no longer needs to be imposed upon us from above. Our private communications have become the Culture Industry, and we are the army of laborers that keep it running.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

raziel2p• 11 years ago

This is a point sorely missed in the article - these types of texts do give room for interpretation and reflection, but often make for polarised reactions. Suddenly you're not just disagreeing with someone's thoughts on something, you feel annoyed at them imposing their way of thinking onto you (and the rest of the reading audience).

javadocmd• 11 years ago

I think you've inadvertently highlighted a defining feature of this generation: in rebellion against the previous generations' "everyone is a special snowflake" message and influenced by the internet's equalizing/anonymizing effect, this generation is marked by a realization that we're not really special. Things that are happening to us have happened a million times before and will happen again. We can't all be whatever we want to be. And so on. It's simultaneously humble and cynical about our place in the world as individuals and our place in history as a people and the universe as a species.

jasode3• 11 years ago

I've been convinced by linguists (Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, etc) that it looks like evolution of syntax to convey meaning and emotions.

Syntax evolution isn't just introduction of old ideas like lowercase+uppercase, Capitalization rules, punctuation (spaces between words, periods & commas to mark rests & beats, etc). Syntax evolution also includes new strange word reorderings, deliberate word omissions, and deliberate word misspellings.

I disagree with the other comment about The Culture Industry as an explanation. That's not relevant. Instead, people are trying to share extra meaning (emotion, irony, etc) through extra channels of new syntax manipulation.

Let's say a writer wants to be sarcastic when writing out bad reasoning. Examples:

Congress keeps buying tanks the Army does not need. Why?

1) explicit labeling of concept with backreference:

"It's good because it maintains jobs. (That was sarcasm.)"

2) HTML tag inspired syntax:

"<sarcasm>It's good because it maintains jobs.</sarcasm>"

3) /s (inspired by Unix command line switch?)

"It's good because it maintains jobs. /s"

4) grammar incorrect because of missing words

"Because jobs."

(It's as if the general public is creating syntax options in English to parallel the computer language verbosity of Objective-C and Java EE to terseness of Perl and Haskell.)

That type of word subtraction creates an interesting abruptness that conveys to the reader a meaning of idiocy or lunacy. Similar phrases can be constructed like "because freedom" or "because science".

Why is the TSA now performing mandatory cavity searches of preschoolers? "Because freedom."

The substraction of words may have been motivated by the mechanics of 2 thumbs typing on smartphones or the Twitter 140 char limit but I think even desktop users with 100wpm typing speed have adopted it.

LyndsySimon2• 11 years ago

In that line, I've sold quite a few "</gov>" and "</government>" vinyl decals to anarchists online.

skybrian• 11 years ago

Abbreviations are less common due to widespread autocomplete, but people still look for ways to type less.

spb• 11 years ago

/s is inspired by CP/M or DOS command switches. If it were Unix, it would be -s or --sarcasm.

JasonFruit• 11 years ago

That feel when people who learned your language later in life can't understand you because you don't follow the rules they were taught.

Also, when you sound really dumb in about ten years.

matt4077• 11 years ago

That feeling when s/o thinks you can't grammar just 'cause you're no native speaker :(

No, seriously, English was my second language and I have no problems understanding most of these innovations.

If you want to help a foreigner out, avoid the "could of / would of" mistake. For some reason it seems to be much more painful for me than for most native speakers.

father_of_two• 11 years ago

When medium articles are too long to read.

That was just kidding, though.

That Way We’re All Writing Now

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