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

[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.