On my mind lately

[firecat]

Internet linguistics. "It was a link to something awesome and it was captioned: 'I have lost all ability to can.'” I love this stuff. And only partly because LOLcat grammar is now likely to pop out of my mouth at inappropriate moments.
http://the-toast.net/2013/11/20/yes-you-can-even/
Are attacks on Internet language related to attacks on selfies? If the claims in this quote are true, then I bet so:

However, what I find most fascinating about the Internet Language is that it is making language less, not more, gendered. Men and women on the Internet use many of the same tropes, enthusiasm markers and emphasizers in order to communicate. In the world of blogging and Internet writing, women are the creators of language. It is a realm in which women are not being socialized with already existing language but are doing the work of socializing and creating a community. Women dominate every important social media platform. Women outnumber men on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and account for 72% of all social media users. On Tumblr, where the number of men and women is roughly equal, women dominate the conversation.

And then there's this blog post excoriating social media for "destroying the English language" by methods such as ""4. The Fragmentation of the Sacred Sentence Structure"...under a subtitle of "Undefined. No Boundaries. Caffeinated."

Comments

[jae]

I work on internet language too (not so much this sort, though it does come up), so it's been really gratifying to see some of that research petering down into the non-academic press! And it's been really great to see the reactions to it, too, and to see that they're not all of the "destroying the English language" sort.

The "destroying the English language" thing will never cease to piss me off, though. I've had to stop reading those kinds of pieces altogether; they make me want to stay up until all hours and write annoying superior-sounding massively-footnoted responses. Language does NOT work the way those people think it works.

-J

[firecat]

Language does NOT work the way those people think it works.

Definitely. (And if you ever write one of those screeds, let me know; I want to read it.)

[silveradept]

Internet Language is following the time-honored trends of slang and neologism - first, roundly mocked for being a corruption of the language that only children, the ignorant, and the lower classes would use, then adopted into mainstream usage, and finally, enshrined in some dictionary or rulebook, by which time, the kids have gone on to something else.

[firecat]

Yeah. One thing I find interesting is that the word "cool" never seems to go out of style.

[stardreamer]

That's a really good point. Most slang is ephemeral and quickly becomes dated, but occasionally a term will successfully enter the language on a long-term basis. I used "cool" recently as an example of one such term. "Okay" is another one, although most people now don't realize it because its origins predate us.

There's a demonstrated phenomenon that people tend to continue to use at least some of the slang that was current during their teen years well into their adult lives. This is also going to contribute to the continuing usage of "cool".

[elf]

I love comparing written language to spoken language. Until very recently, written language was never "native" in the way spoken words are--they were used to record information, to share it over time, but not for casual spur-of-the-moment communication. Written language developed rules based on long-term archiving needs, not two-minute reaction needs.

And now we have written language that's serving the same purposes as spoken language: telling someone you'll be late for dinner, or pointing out something pretty that you won't remember in an hour, or asking who's available for a ride to the train station. And, heh, it's developing the same dialectic, slang-ridden, shortcut patterns that happen in speech.

I have some sympathy for teachers who have to push students into learning writing skills that directly contradict their social writing habits; I have none for people who bemoan the loss of the "purity" of the English language. English doesn't have any "purity" to protect.

[firecat]

Of all the languages English possibly has the least purity to protect.

[thnidu]

Cue the James Nicoll quote:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

[firecat]

:D :D :D
I was wondering how long it would take for that to show up!

[thnidu]

Twice! See the comment after it.

[the_siobhan]

[Insert James Nicoll quote here.]

:-)

[thnidu]

(vide supra) :-)

Or, as my old buddy used to say, "Great minds crawl in the same gutter."

[firecat]

I has a happy.

[thnidu]

Whoops, it was "Small minds run in the same gutter." :-)

[thnidu]

Heh. I've just come from an Esperanto Philadelphia meetup, where some of the chat was about prescriptivism and using (or not using) only roots officially accepted by the Academy of Esperanto.

(I had a wonderful time, my first long conversation (>2hrs) with fellow E-ists in years.)

η: Boosted

[firecat]

Sounds awesome!

[stardreamer]

One thing nobody ever seems to be aware of in these "The Internet is killing our language, oh noes!" articles is code-switching. Everybody does it to some extent; I certainly write (and speak, for that matter) differently in a formal context than I do in a casual one. But somehow whenever young people are doing something different with language, they are never going to be able to understand that there are times when you need a different language structure -- something that native speakers of any language pick up as they are learning to talk.

[firecat]

Exactly.

[leafrider.livejournal.com]

It's impossible to "destroy" the English language. Language evolves over time, and the Internet is simply causing it to evolve in unexpected ways. I don't always like what I see happening to it, but I'm old school and I know it, and I also realize it's just me being resistant to change. It seems to me that if we let ourselves, the older we get the more we'll hate the world, unless we allow change and go with the flow.

Of course some of what's going on is just language fads. There were people who thought the hippies destroyed the language, but some of the language they used, if one uses it today, just sounds hokey and dated. It's out of style, and the older forms still exist.

[firecat]

I certainly have my peeves about some changes, and others delight me.

This toy gets at how many words and phrases are fads:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/12/oed-birthday-words/

[leafrider.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love that. Thanks for the link. :)