That Way We’re All Writing Now
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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
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?
A lot of everything is "artificially constructed". The Beatles artificially constructed their songs.
Any sufficiently advanced "artificial construction" is indistinguishable from "organic construction".
Because Shakespeare's slang and in-jokes are normal English today.
edit: The comparison to Shakespeare just seems kind of off, but beyond that, I never argued that the vernacular / slang being generated today wouldn't be used or become accepted by society at large.
>It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang
>, I never argued that the vernacular / slang being generated today wouldn't be used or become accepted by society at large.
If those 2 sentences are not contradictions, can you clarify your comment?
Isn't "accepted by society at large" part of what culture __is__ ?
A "language progress" is a movement in usage and meaning. We "progressed" from "thy" "thee" to "your" "you" etc. It doesn't mean the words starting with "y" are "better" or "clearer" (in fact, they are the opposite of the previous formal/informal distinctions.) Nevertheless, language/culture has moved on.
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).
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.
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.
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?
For instance, http://xkcd.com/245/
Or: "That dog is cute (which is more than I can say for the owner)".
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.
Later works often lampooned and subverted those tropes, of course.
>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.
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.
Also, when you sound really dumb in about ten years.
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.
That was just kidding, though.