surveys on the internet, 20–21
“suttin” (something), 24
swearing, 24, 28, 29, 35
table flip kaomoji, 179
Tagliamonte, Sali, 59–60
Tannen, Deborah, 208
Tatman, Rachael, 25–26
tech support, 88–89
teens. See youth
telephones, 198–99, 201–3, 218–19, 235
text-to-speech technology, 151
texting
and informal/formal language used on, 56, 59–60
and Pre Internet People cohort, 94
real-time aspects of, 217–18
“text” as generic term for “chat,” 216
utterances in, 110–11
Textio, 49–50
textisms, 58
Thede, Robin, 172
“they” as singular, 44, 48
third places, 220–21
email mediation of, 223–24
internet communities/platforms as, 224–28
losing track of time in, 223
Oldenburg’s concept of, 220, 223, 227
physical vs. virtual, 228
social benefits of, 225
and television consumption, 227
Third Wave of Internet People, 92–93. See also Post Internet People cohort; Pre Internet People cohort
tildes
conveying enthusiasm, 127–28
conveying sarcasm, 134–35, 136–39
and lengthening of words, 131
tone of voice, 109–54
and aesthetic/creative typography, 127–28, 130–31
and all caps, 115–19
and asterisks, 127–28
and emotional labor, 124–25
and exclamation!compounds, 131–32
and exclamation marks, 123–25
and hashtags, 128–30
and in-jokes, 126–27
and lengthening of words, 119–21, 131, 152
and “lol” usage, 125
and minimalist typography, 139–50, 152
and periods, 113–14, 136–37, 152, 271
and politeness hedges, 122–23
and punctuation standards, 114–15
and sarcasm/irony, 133–38
and smileys, 125–26
and sparkle enthusiasm, 127–28, 135
and tildes, 127–28, 131, 135, 136–39
and twentieth-century precedents, 151–52
and underscores, 127–28
and writing on behalf of another, 153
topic-based internet communities, 224–25
trademarks for emphasis, 145
truncation of words, 9
“ttfn” (ta ta for now), 73
Tumblr, 64, 144–45
turn-taking in conversations, 207–9
Twitter
@ used on, 55–56
# used on, 55–56, 129–30
adoption of terms seen on, 29–30
and aesthetic/creative typography, 128
and ages of users, 86
analysis of language on, 33
Arabic-speaking users on, 54
creative respellings on, 25, 56
as data source for Oxford English Dictionary, 24–25
and Full Internet People cohort, 79
gender differences in language on, 35
and geographic coordinate tags, 23
gifs on, 164
and Library of Congress’s archive of tweets, 22–23
linguistic innovation in, 39
and minimalist typography, 146
name treatment for, 48
in non-English languages, 270
norms of clusters on, 35
and Old Internet People cohort, 73
and Post Internet People cohort, 100
as source of linguistic data, 22, 23–25
status updates on, 222, 227
and strong/weak ties in, 39
subtweeting practices on, 232–33
third-place functions of, 228
Ulysses (Joyce), 152
underscores, 127–28
Unicode Consortium, 181–82, 183
Unix, 139
uppercase. See case
uptalk, 34
Urban Dictionary, 135–37, 151
Usenet
on all caps as yelling, 116
founding population of, 80
Hitler/Nazi comparisons on, 239
and Jargon File, 72–73
and Old Internet People cohort, 68–70
as third place, 224
usernames, 74, 80
“UTSL” (use the source, Luke!), 74
utterances, 110, 114
vaguebooking, 232–33
Vezza, Albert, 204
video “chilling” apps, 235
videocalling, 219–20
videochat apps, 94, 220
viral content, 38
VK (Russian social media site), 57–58
Wagner, Mariana, 129–30
Waseleski, Carol, 124
Washington, D.C., 50
Watson (IBM AI system), 151
Watts, Leon, 189–90
“We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs” (Jackson), 165
webrings, 79
WeChat, 216
Welcome to Night Vale, 64
Wenker, Georg, 18, 19
West, Jessamyn, 94–95, 96
WhatsApp, 100, 213, 216
Wikipedia, 49, 123, 262, 270
Wilkins, John, 133
Wired Style, 86–87, 117
women and linguistic changes, 33–35
Word Wagon linguistic research, 19, 21
writer’s block, 61
“wtf” (what the fuck), 83
Wyld, H. C., 44
Xanga, 78
Xeroxlore, 255, 256
X-Files, The (television series), 132
Xu, Christina, 247
“yinz” (plural “you”), 23
youth
coded posts of, 232
and context collapse issue, 103
and devices, 101
and emojis, 189–90
and entrance into social groups, 32
informal/formal language mix used by, 59–60
and instant messaging programs, 226
and language appropriation, 50–51
linguistic influence of peers, 27–30
and minimalist typography, 142, 144–45
preference for private messaging, 82
and social media usage, 29–30, 81
sociability trends of, 101–4
virtually hanging out, 189–90, 226, 227
See also Post Internet People cohort
YouTube
and ages of users, 86
name treatment for, 48
and Post Internet People cohort, 93, 100
and Pre Internet People cohort, 93
You’ve Got Mail (film), 69–70, 76
“zed” vs. “zee” (for letter Z), 40–41
Zimmer, Ben, 75, 116
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
A NOTE ABOUT THE TYPE
The display type of this book consists of Helvetica Neue LT Std and Gotham. The original font Helvetica was modified to create Helvetica Neue LT Std, which was designed by Max Miedinger and other project members at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei. Gotham was designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000, inspired by architectural signage of the mid–twentieth century.
The emoji shown in this book are images created using the Twemoji font. Twemoji is an open source emoji font created by Twitter,
Inc., and other contributors, which was first released in 2014 and updated with subsequent Unicode emoji specifications. The version used in this book is Twemoji 11.3, which was the most recent version at time of printing. Twemoji is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gretchen McCulloch writes about linguistics for a general audience, especially internet language. She writes the Resident Linguist column at Wired (and formerly at The Toast). McCulloch has a master’s in linguistics from McGill University, runs the blog All Things Linguistic, and cohosts Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. She lives in Montreal, but also on the internet.
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*With thanks to Eliza, the Very Good Cat of A.E. Prevost.
*Absent Without Official Leave, situation normal all fucked up, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and RAdio Detection And Ranging.
*If you’re wondering why mercredi won, well, the north is where Paris is. Di means “day,” so either order is logical in principle, and indeed for dimanche, “Sunday,” the di-first version won.
*If you think of English ol’, these latter two may not seem surprising.
*Note that North American English speakers often pronounce Scottish “loch” or German “Bach” further back in the throat than warranted, while pronouncing Spanish “Mexico” as if it’s /h/. As pronounced by native speakers, all three are the same sound, which the International Phonetic Alphabet represents as /x/.
*Though the seeming obviousness of emoji can be deceptive, as we’ll see in Chapter 5.
*The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act has various regulations for websites catering to those aged twelve or younger, and for ease of enforcement many sites simply require users to be thirteen or older.
*The nineties version of “oh my god, my boss doesn’t realize that periods are passive-aggressive” was “oh my god, my boss doesn’t realize that all caps is shouting.”
*And z̯ͯa̺l̄͊̂g̬̱͚o̫̯̱͓̦ͩ or g̰͊̽̍́ḷ̭̝ỉ̗̥̘̟̤̟͋̈t̳̯̜̣̂ͭͣ͆ͮc̹̜̻̲͈̻͇ȟͪ́ text, a uniquely internet style which exploits the fact that Unicode lets you stack marks above and below letters infinitely.
*Referring to Harry Potter in the fifth book, where he spends a lot of time yelling in capslock.
*This system isn’t so dissimilar from that which gave us many common surnames, such as Alex (the) Smith or Alex (who lives by the) Wood.
*Or at least, I sure hope they are, because otherwise you’re halfway through a book where I’ve been passive-aggressive to you the whole time. SORRY.
*The telephone-answering problem also faced many other languages during the same period. French allô and German Hallo evoke English “hello,” but other languages use variations on “good,” “yes,” “ready,” “please,” “who,” or the answerer’s name.
*Please read this to yourself in appropriately exaggerated infant-directed intonation.
*No cats were harmed in the making of this example.
*The dance is not real, to my knowledge, but the Canada planet meme is. Try imgur.com/gallery/gsMqxpq or google “Canada a bit to the left meme.”
*You can read the whole thing at lolcatbible.com, but for a sense of what it’s like, Ceiling Cat is God, Basement Cat is the Devil, Happy Cat is Jesus, and tents are often replaced by sofas.
*Notwithstanding the fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was once a member of the latter, and I do not know his status on the former.
*Linguist Llama says, “I wanna be a schwa. It’s never stressed.”
Because Internet Page 36
