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.)