In writing, we often make language more efficient by selecting just a few important letters or squishing symbols together into a new shape, even if the resulting formations aren’t pronounceable. The types of ideas that get acronyms or abbreviations have evolved along with what sorts of things people wanted to write efficiently. The Romans found it much easier to inscribe coins and statues with SPQR than the full Senatus Populusque Romanus. Medieval scribes smooshed common words together into new symbols such as & and %. When the Renaissance brought with it an increased interest in the classics and sciences, scholars abbreviated Latin phrases like e.g. (“for example”) and ibid. (“in the same reference already cited”). But the true golden era of acronyms began surprisingly recently. The word “acronym” itself entered English only in 1940, and acronyms, especially the kind that are pronounced as a single word rather than a series of letters, began flourishing during World War II, when soldiers used acronyms like AWOL, snafu, WAAF, and radar.* After the war, acronyms just kept proliferating, especially for organizations, new discoveries, and other names: laser, NASA, NATO, AIDS, NAACP, codec, Eniac, UNESCO, UNICEF, OPEC, FIFA, NASDAQ, FDR, CD-ROM, MoMA, DNA, and so on. These forms are shorter in writing, but not necessarily more efficient in speech, even though we sometimes speak them aloud when we’re talking about specialized topics: it takes longer to say “ampersand” or “WWF” than “and” or “World Wildlife Fund.” Technical acronyms reflect writing as a formal domain, which aims to maximize efficiency on bureaucratic procedures and long-winded names.
The internet has acronym’d some technical terms as well, like url, jpeg, or html, but a lot of what we’re writing is informal and conversational. A new kind of social acronym has come into use, based on common conversational phrases rather than technical jargon—less BAC (blood-alcohol content) and more btw (by the way), less OBE (Order of the British Empire) and more omg (oh my god), less LAX (the airport code for Los Angeles) and more lol (originally “laughing out loud,” though now a more subtle meaning, which we’ll get to in Chapter 3). I think it’s disingenuous to follow formal tradition at the expense of regular usage in a book that’s entirely about regular usage, so I’ve made the stylistic decision to write social, internet acronyms in all-lowercase, while often keeping technical acronyms in uppercase, because people on the internet primarily reserve LOL and OMG for when they’re SHOUTING.
Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality. Their form comes from the writing side: acronyms reduce the number of letters you type, although not necessarily the number of syllables you articulate. In other words, “I dunno” is efficient in speech, whereas “idk” is efficient in writing. Their function comes from the informal side: the phrases are personal expressions of our feelings and beliefs, like “I don’t know,” “what the fuck,” “just so you know,” “as far as I know,” “in my opinion,” “today I learned,” and “that feeling when.” With technical acronyms, the long version and the short version are invented at the same time, sometimes with an eye to how the initial letters of a phrase will fit together as an acronym. Social acronyms are instead made out of phrases that are already common: a sure sign of bad internet linguistics is EIAFUP (Elaborate Invented Acronyms for Uncommon Phrases). We’re not pure efficiency maximizers, however; we also sometimes respell words when we want to make writing evoke speech, or speak acronyms when we want to make speech evoke writing. Efficiency simply points to where and why a particular abbreviation originated.
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Another example of how the internet melds writing and informality is in how we use visuals. In casual speech, we don’t generally converse in pitch-blackness, with our backs to each other, or with our hands tied behind our backs, a paper bag over our heads, and our voices in a robotic monotone. I mean, you could get a message across that way, but you’d be missing something. Often, we gesture: the next time you’re in a public place, look around at groups of people and notice how you can tell who’s talking by looking at who’s gesturing. We use gesture and tone of voice to reinforce our message or add another layer of meaning to it: “Good job!” plus a thumbs up is sincere, while with rolled eyes it’s sarcastic.
Formal speech uses fewer and more stylized gestures. Television reporters may point at a weather map or shuffle a few pieces of paper, but for the most part, their hands remain still and their faces remain in a narrow range between serious and cheerful—no waving, eye-rolling, sobbing, or uproarious laughter. Public speakers are often advised to cut down on their natural movements: a classic tip for improving your public speaking is to watch a video of your performance so you can notice and reduce repetitive gestures. Both styles are often cropped just below the shoulder, by a camera or a lectern, so we can’t see the speaker’s hands even if they did move them. People have been prescribing formal gestures for a long time: the Roman orator Quintilian advised rhetoricians that acceptable gestures included pointing and gestures of admiration, wonder, rejection, certainty, pleading, and others which “naturally proceed from us simultaneously with our words,” but that pantomime and similar attempts to act out one’s actual words should be reserved for the theater rather than the law courts.
Writing is a technology. Speaking and signing require only our human bodies and the energy we infuse them with, and we’ve never met a society without one or both. But writing requires something external to the body: even if you write on your own arm with your own blood, you’ll need to prick yourself to do so, thereby making the blood external. Writing systems, therefore, are greatly affected by the tools available to make them: it’s easier to carve wood or stone in a straight line, but easier to swirl and loop with ink. The images that go along with our writing also reflect the available tools. Medieval illumination was on calfskin vellum with pigments made of ground beetles or stones; print drawings were cut into wood so the raised areas could be inked and pressed onto paper; cameras fixed a tiny pinhole of light onto a ribbon of film with silver compounds. In any circumstance, some colors and shapes were easier than others.
Formal writing is disembodied in the same way that formal speech is. Just like a news anchor is supposed to be a conduit for the news, not its maker, the images of formal writing represent the content, not the author. Sometimes formal images present information, like graphs and diagrams. Sometimes they create a record, like maps and portraits. Sometimes they’re eye-catching and tell stories, like in stained glass and picture books.
What’s cool about informal writing is that, once we had the technology to send any image anywhere, we used it to restore our bodies to our writing, to give a sense of who’s talking and what mood we’re in when we’re saying things. Take emoji, those small images that enliven our digital messages. There are thousands of them, ranging from animals to foods to nature to common household and workplace objects. And yet the most commonly used sets of emoji are the faces and hands, like the smile, the face with tears of joy, the thumbs up, and the crossed fingers. We use emoji less to describe the world around us, and more to be fully ourselves in an online world.
We do the same with gifs. In theory, you can put any image in an animated eight-frame loop. (In the 1990s, people used grainy, animated “under construction” gifs, ornamented with hard hats and traffic cones, to apologize for portions of their homepages that were incomplete.) In practice, the gifs of the 2010s are reaction gifs: silent, looping animations of people, animals, or cartoon characters doing a specific, expressive gesture which you invoke as a representation of your own body under the circumstances, saying that right now you’re laughing, or applauding, or looking around in bewilderment, just like the person in the gif is. Early visualizations of cyberspace thought we might want to manipulate three-dimensional figurines of ourselves in order to interact with each other in virtual space. But it turned out, what we really wanted was less about dressing up our avatars in fanciful digital clothing and more about conveying what we’re think
ing and feeling. We can recruit a wide range of tools, from acronyms to emoji to punctuation, in order to do so.
The first writing systems were deeply aware of their limitations. They wrote only words, a mere aid to the memory of the reader, who had to infuse them with life again on saying them. Gradually, over the centuries, we began adding punctuation and other typographical enhancements. Just as crucially, we began expecting more subtlety from the written text: we began to see writing as a thing that could represent verbatim speech and stream of consciousness, even if most of us were reading it rather than writing it. The internet was the final key in this process that had begun with medieval scribes and modernist poets—it made us all writers as well as readers. We no longer accept that writing must be lifeless, that it can only convey our tone of voice roughly and imprecisely, or that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals. We’re creating new rules for typographical tone of voice. Not the kind of rules that are imposed from on high, but the kind of rules that emerge from the collective practice of a couple billion social monkeys—rules that enliven our social interactions.
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Whatever else is changing for good or for bad in the world, the continued evolution of language is neither the solution to all our problems nor the cause of them. It simply is. You never truly step into the same English twice. When future historians look back on this era, they’ll find our changes just as fascinating as we now find innovative words from Shakespeare or Latin or Norman French. So let’s adopt the perspective of these future historians now, and explore the revolutionary period in linguistic history that we’re living through from a place of excitement and curiosity.
If you’re worried that this revolution is leaving you behind, or if you’re so cutting-edge that it’s hard to explain yourself to non-internet people, this book will help you bridge that gap. It will help you understand how we got here, why people get so passionate about a stray period or three, and how linguistic changes on the internet fit into the broader picture of the incredible capacity of human language. You’ll never look at your quickly dashed-off text messages the same way again.
Chapter 2
Language and Society
Why do you talk the way you do?
You’ve lived somewhere—perhaps many somewheres. Your friends or family have influenced you. You’ve probably even thought about how you like some linguistic features and want to avoid others. People have long been aware that these factors influence why different groups speak differently, but the systematic study of dialect began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as part of the same scientific movements that gave us the Linnaean catalogue of the living world and the periodic table of the elements. While some cataloguers set out with nets to study butterflies, or burned candles inside jars to distill gases, others pored over ancient scripts and compiled lists of verbs.
Maps
But what kind of net can you use to capture living language? A German dialectologist named Georg Wenker thought he had an answer: he sent out a postal survey to schoolteachers across German-speaking Europe and asked them to translate forty sentences (such as “I will slap your ears with the cooking spoon, you monkey!”) into the local vernacular. It was a wise enough idea: teachers would be guaranteed to be able to read and write, and even if Wenker didn’t know the name of every single village teacher, surely the village post office in, say, Quedlinburg, could pass on his letter to the Quedlinburg village school. But in order to make it easy for the schoolteachers to respond, Wenker didn’t provide them with any training in phonetic notation. This meant that if one teacher wrote “Affe” (monkey) and another teacher wrote “Afe” or “Aphe,” it was anyone’s guess whether they were trying to represent the same pronunciation.
A French linguist named Jules Gilliéron thought he had a better method. Rather than send out letters like Wenker, he’d send out a trained fieldworker to administer all the surveys. Back in Paris, Gilliéron could get a start on analyzing the results as they came in. The fieldworker he selected was a grocer named Edmond Edmont, who reportedly had a particularly astute ear (it’s not clear whether this referred to the acuity of his hearing or his attention to phonetic detail, but either way, it got him the job). Gilliéron trained Edmont in phonetic notation and sent him off on a bicycle with a list of 1,500 questions, such as “What do you call a cup?” and “How do you say the number fifty?” Over the next four years Edmont cycled to 639 French villages, sending results back to Gilliéron periodically. In each village, he interviewed an older person who had lived in the region for their entire life, counting them as representative of the history of the area.
Both Wenker’s and Gilliéron’s dialect maps are meticulous, fascinating, and complicated, but if you know how to read them, you can trace the line between the villages in the north where French people around 1900 called Wednesday mercredi and those in the south where they called it dimècres.* Or you can read Wenker’s hand-drawn map of Germany showing which regions pronounced “old” as alt, al, or oll.* If you studied French or German in school, it’s easy to think that they’re each a single, unitary language, but that’s just the formal version: the maps showcase how these languages are truly constellations of dialects, hundreds of varieties that differ slightly from village to village.
But these spectacular linguistic atlases are also limited. If Edmond Edmont, towards the end of his four-year odyssey, realized that different regions also had different words for bicycle, he either had to bike back through those same 639 French villages, or make a note of it and just hope that some future scholar would undertake a second linguistic Tour de France. Georg Wenker’s project was almost too successful: he ended up with more than 44,000 completed surveys between 1876 and 1926, more than he could possibly analyze by hand. (His colleagues continued analyzing his results for decades after his death.)
As technology advanced, so did dialectology. In the 1960s, the Dictionary of American Regional English sent out fieldworkers in “Word Wagons” (green Dodge vans outfitted with a fold-out bed, an icebox, and a gas stovetop) to record locals in over a thousand communities on briefcase-sized reel-to-reel tape recorders. In the 1990s, the creators of The Atlas of North American English let their fingers do the biking and conducted telephone interviews with 762 random people, at least two from each major urban area. In 2002, the Harvard Dialect Survey produced a linguistic questionnaire that anyone could complete online: thanks to media coverage in The New York Times, USA Today, and many other outlets, over thirty thousand people did.
All of these studies have produced incredibly cool results: not only did they show that the rise of radio, television, and other mass media wasn’t eradicating regional language variation, but they’ve also made many of their resources freely available online. You can go browse The Atlas of North American English yourself and see changing colors of dots midway through the United States where people switch from “pop” to “coke” to “soda,” and then another line at the Canadian border where they switch back to “pop” again. On the Dictionary of American Regional English site, you can scroll through a “Word Wheel” of interesting vocabulary items, from “Adam’s housecat” to “zydeco.” The Harvard Dialect Survey results, downloadable in full, even found new life a decade later as the YouTube accent challenge, a viral video meme where thousands of people from around the world filmed themselves answering questions from the survey, and as the dataset at the base of “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” the massively popular New York Times dialect quiz that introduced many people to the idea of mapping out how you speak in 2013.
But if you’ve ever hung up on a telemarketer or fudged your answers to a “Which Disney Princess Are You” quiz, you know some of the potential problems with phone and internet surveys. On the phone, researchers could record audio, but they still had to have an individual conversation with each person they surveyed. While operating a Word Wagon or a linguistic phone bank is a f
ascinating job for the right type of language nerd (um, hi), such nerds still need to be paid for the massive amounts of time and labor they’re putting into the interviews. Internet surveys are faster and cheaper to conduct at a huge scale, but people still don’t always accurately report on their own language usage.
Running through all the surveys is a problem called the observer’s paradox: when you sit someone down with a tape recorder or hand them a list of questions to check off, it tends to bring out the formal, standardized, job-interview style of language, which is the least interesting linguistically because it’s already so well documented. But looking into less well-documented varieties requires researchers to seek answers that they may not know the questions for, and the people they’re studying are sometimes unaware or self-conscious about some of the most interesting aspects of their speech, so they can’t or won’t talk about it explicitly.
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