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

[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." :-)