may be Very Old Indeed: A connection first proposed by Tumblr user uglyfun: uglyfun. May 10, 2017. uglyfun.tumblr.com/post/160525273744/hi-im-here-to-propose-that-aa-milnes [inactive], quoting chapter 4 of A. A. Milne. 1926. Winnie-the-Pooh. Methuen.
Two LiveJournal threads: Anonymous. August 7, 2012. “Leading tilde?” Fail. Fandom. Anon. fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/38277.html?thread=173014917#t173014917. Wayback Machine / archive.org and Google Search are blocked by the site’s robots.txt, but a searchable archive of this forum is available on Google Groups at groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sock_gryphon_group/c0juZF--BL8%5B551-575%5D.
“It seems to designate”: Seasontoseason. July 12, 2010. “Tilde in Internet Slang.” Linguaphiles LiveJournal group. linguaphiles.livejournal.com/5169778.html.
“what I am guessing”: Anonymous. August 7, 2012. “Leading tilde?” Fail. Fandom. Anon. fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/38277.html?thread=173014917#t173014917. Wayback Machine / archive.org and Google Search blocked by site’s robots.txt, but a searchable archive of this forum is available on Google Groups at groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sock_gryphon_group/c0juZF--BL8%5B551-575%5D.
2010 LiveJournal thread: Seasontoseason. July 12, 2010. “Tilde in Internet Slang.” Linguaphiles LiveJournal group. linguaphiles.livejournal.com/5169778.html.
“somewhere between sarcasm”: Joseph Bernstein. January 5, 2015. “The Hidden Language of the ~Tilde~.” BuzzFeed. www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-hidden-language-of-the-tilde#.ut0PpRAL3.
popular computer operating system Unix: The Open Group. (No date cited.) “History and Timeline.” Unix.org. www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html.
actually crackers: Eric S. Raymond, ed. December 29, 2003. “Hacker Writing Style.” The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.7. www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html.
“Netiquette” guides: Chris Pirillo. 1999. “E-mail Etiquette (Netiquette).” The Internet Writing Journal. www.writerswrite.com/journal/dec99/e-mail-etiquette-netiquette-12995.
forum posts into the mid-2000s: Damian. May 4, 2000. “People Who Don’t Capitalize Their I’s.” Everything2. everything2.com/title/People+who+don%2527t+capitalize+their+I%2527s.
terms of ease of use: Norm De Plume. September 26, 2004. “Why do some people write entirely in lowercase?” DVD Talk. forum.dvdtalk.com/archive/t-387605.html. Postroad. August 4, 2006. “Why do so many people always use lower case letters when using the net?” Ask Metafilter. ask.metafilter.com/43656/Why-do-so-many-people-always-use-lower-case-letters-when-using-the-net.
Trend pieces about passive-aggressive texting: Ben Crair. November 25, 2013. “The Period Is Pissed.” New Republic. newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simplest-punctuation-mark-has-become-sign-anger. Brittany Taylor. March 4, 2015. “8 Passive Aggressive Texts Everybody Sends (and What to Type Instead!).” Teen Vogue. www.teenvogue.com/story/passive-aggressive-texts-everyone-sends. Dan Bilefsky. June 9, 2016. “Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going out of Style.” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/world/europe/period-full-stop-point-whatever-its-called-millennials-arent-using-it.html?_r=0. Jeff Guo. June 13, 2016. “Stop Using Periods. Period.” The Washington Post. medium.com/thewashingtonpost/stop-using-periods-period-93a6bb357ed0#.fqi6as3ly.
surpassed sales of non-smart cellphones: Peter Svensson. April 28, 2013. “Smartphones Now Outsell ‘Dumb’ Phones.” Newshub. www.newshub.co.nz/technology/smartphones-now-outsell-dumb-phones-2013042912.
informal poll on Twitter in 2016: Gretchen McCulloch. December 9, 2016. twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/807321178713059328.
involving their undergraduate students: Anne Curzan. April 24, 2013. “Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca blog. www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not-just-a-punctuation-mark-anymore/.
partnering with local schools: Sali Tagliamonte. 2011. Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. John Wiley & Sons.
thesis by Harley Grant: Harley Grant. 2015. “Tumblinguistics: Innovation and Variation in New Forms of Written CMC.” Master’s thesis, University of Glasgow.
thesis by Molly Ruhl: Molly Ruhl. 2016. “Welcome to My Twisted Thesis: An Analysis of Orthographic Conventions on Tumblr.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University.
You either need to be: Grant and Ruhl are examples of the former; for an example of the latter about a different topic see: Elli E. Bourlai. 2017. “‘Comments in Tags, Please!’ Tagging Practices on Tumblr.” Discourse Context Media.
between ages sixteen and twenty-four: Cooper Smith. December 13, 2013. “Tumblr Offers Advertisers a Major Advantage: Young Users, Who Spend Tons of Time on the Site.” Business Insider. www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-and-social-media-demographics-2013-12.
most popular such post: copperbooms. July 30. 2012. “when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing.” Copperbooms. copperbooms.tumblr.com/post/28333799478/when-did-tumblr-collectively-decide-not-to-use.
“when did tumblr” . . . this and similar posts: Archived version of whole post and a few similar ones by tumblinguistics. tumblinguistics.tumblr.com/post/113810945986/tumblinguistics-apocalypsecanceled-sunfell.
“i think it’s really Cool”: Original post by user eternalgirlscout. May 20, 2016. eternalgirlscout.tumblr.com/post/144661931903/i-think-its-really-cool-how-there-are-so-many. First reply by user takethebulletsoutyourson. July 25, 2016. takethebulletsoutyourson.tumblr.com/post/147975549371/eternalgirlscout-i-think-its-really-cool-how. Second reply by user eternalgirlscout. July 25, 2016. eternalgirlscout.tumblr.com/post/147978362708/takethebulletsoutyourson-eternalgirlscout-i. Archive by Molly Ruhl: amollyakatrina.tumblr.com/post/150704937613/eternalgirlscout-takethebulletsoutyourson.
“i just want”: Jonny Sun. October 1, 2014. twitter.com/jonnysun/status/517461703630794752.
fifty original paintings: Jerome Tomasini. October 22, 2016. “How a Tweet by @jonnysun Resonated with People & Inspired More Art.” twitter.com/i/moments/789936594480427008.
Sun cited instead a soft/weird: Sophie Chou. September 27, 2017. “How to Speak Like an aliebn—No, That’s Not a Typo.” The World in Words. www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-27/How-Speak-Aliebn-No-Thats-Not-Typo.
If polite typography: Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2004. “Verbal Irony Use in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Conversations.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23(4). pp. 447–463.
Any variation from an expected baseline: Molly Ruhl. 2016. “Welcome to My Twisted Thesis: An Analysis of Orthographic Conventions on Tumblr.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University.
one much-reblogged post: tangleofrainbows. August 17, 2015. “re: how teens and adults text, I would be super interested for you to explain your theory!” Tangleofrainbows. tangleofrainbows.tumblr.com/post/126889100409/re-how-teens-and-adults-text-i-would-be-super.
psychologist Jeffrey Hancock: Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2004. “Verbal Irony Use in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Conversations.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23(4). pp. 447–463.
IBM experimented: Alexis C. Madrigal. January 10, 2013. “IBM’s Watson Memorized the Entire ‘Urban Dictionary,’ Then His Overlords Had to Delete It.” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-watson-memorized-the-entire-urban-dictionary-then-his-overlords-had-to-delete-it/267047/.
Chapter 5. Emoji and Other Internet Gestures
Second Life made: The most recent statistic that Linden Lab provides is from 2013 and consists of 36 million accounts created in total, with a million monthly active users. (No author cited.) June 20, 2013. “Infographic: 10 Years of Second Life.” Linden Lab. www.lindenlab.com/releases/infographic-10-years-of-second-life. This 2017 article estimated 600,000 regular users: Leslie Jamison. November 11, 2017. “The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future.�
� The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/.
over six thousand articles: Mark Davis and Peter Edberg, eds. May 18, 2017. “Unicode® Technical Standard #51 UNICODE EMOJI.” The Unicode Consortium. www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Introduction.
newspapers in six countries: Ben Medlock and Gretchen McCulloch. 2016. “The Linguistic Secrets Found in Billions of Emoji.” Presented at SXSW, March 11–20, 2016, Austin, Texas. www.slideshare.net/SwiftKey/the-linguistic-secrets-found-in-billions-of-emoji-sxsw-2016-presentation-59956212.
So she started in on: Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch. 2019. “Emoji Are Digital Gesture.” Language@Internet.
Many theorists call them emblems: Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen. 1969. “The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding.” Semiotica 1. pp. 49–98.
the middle finger: Lauren Gawne. October 8, 2015. “Up Yours: The Gesture That Divides America and the UK.” Strong Language. stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/up-yours-the-gesture-that-divides-america-and-the-uk/.
obscene emblems: Desmond Morris, Peter Collett, Peter Marsh, and Marie O’Shaughnessy. 1979. Gestures, Their Origin and Distribution. Jonathan Cape.
The eggplant emoji: Regan Hoffman. June 3, 2015. “The Complete (and Sometimes Sordid) History of the Eggplant Emoji.” First We Feast. firstwefeast.com/features/2015/06/eggplant-emoji-history.
“It says ‘I don’t like that’”: Lauren Schwartzberg. November 18, 2014. “The Oral History of the Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop to America).” Fast Company. www.fastcompany.com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-to-america.
different app or device manufacturers: Jason Snell. January 16, 2017. “More Emoji Fragmentation.” Six Colors. sixcolors.com/link/2017/01/more-emoji-fragmentation/.
“The Year of Emoji Convergence”: “2018: The Year of Emoji Convergence.” February 13, 2018. Emojipedia. https://blog.emojipedia.org/2018-the-year-of-emoji-convergence/.
“like texting, but you get”: Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Maeve Duggan, Aaron Smith, and Meredith Beaton. May 21, 2013. “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.” Pew Research Center. www.pewinternet.org/2013/05/21/teens-social-media-and-privacy/.
The most engaging gifs: Saeideh Bakhshi, David A. Shamma, Lyndon Kennedy, Yale Song, Paloma de Juan, and Joseph Kaye. 2016. “Fast, Cheap, and Good: Why Animated GIFs Engage Us.” Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 575–586.
Certain gifs are so emblematic: Tomberry. January 12, 2015. “Popcorn GIFs.” Know Your Meme. knowyourmeme.com/memes/popcorn-gifs.
appropriation from African American culture: Geneva Smitherman. 2006. Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans. Taylor & Francis.
spread via sports teams: John Mooallem. April 12, 2013. “History of the High Five.” ESPN.com. www.espn.com/espn/story/_/page/Mag15historyofthehighfive/who-invented-high-five.
the fistbump: LaMont Hamilton. September 22, 2014. “Five on the Black Hand Side: Origins and Evolutions of the Dap.” Folklife. folklife.si.edu/talkstory/2014/five-on-the-black-hand-sideorigins-and-evolutions-of-the-dap.
painting fingernails emoji: Alexander Abad-Santos and Allie Jones. March 26, 2014. “The Five Non-Negotiable Best Emojis in the Land.” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/the-only-five-emojis-you-need/359646/. www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/shade.
She linked this stereotype: Sianne Ngai. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press.
when you can’t gesture: Frances H. Rauscher, Robert M. Krauss, and Yihsiu Chen. 1996. “Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production.” Psychological Science 7(4). pp. 226–231.
Every culture: Pierre Feyereisen and Jacques-Dominique De Lannoy. 1991. Gestures and Speech: Psychological Investigations. Cambridge University Press. David McNeill. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. University of Chicago Press.
we gesture along with our speech: Akiba A. Cohen and Randall P. Harrison. 1973. “Intentionality in the Use of Hand Illustrators in Face-to-Face Communication Situations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28(2). pp. 276–279.
people who have been blind: Jana M. Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1997. “What’s Communication Got to Do with It? Gesture in Children Blind from Birth.” Developmental Psychology 33(3). pp. 453–467. Jana M. Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. “Why People Gesture When They Speak.” Nature 396(6708). p. 228.
co-speech or illustrative gesture: Pierre Feyereisen and Jacques-Dominique De Lannoy. 1991. Gestures and Speech: Psychological Investigations. Cambridge University Press. David McNeill. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. University of Chicago Press.
about the thinking of the speaker: Robert M. Krauss, Yihsiu Chen, and Rebecca F. Gottesman. 2000. “Lexical Gestures and Lexical Access: A Process Model.” In D. McNeill, ed., Language and Gesture: Window into Thought and Action. Cambridge University Press. pp. 261–283.
better at solving math problems: Mingyuan Chu and Sotaro Kita. 2011. “The Nature of Gestures’ Beneficial Role in Spatial Problem Solving.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 140(1). pp. 102–116. Sara C. Broaders, Susan Wagner Cook, Zachary Mitchell, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2007. “Making Children Gesture Brings Out Implicit Knowledge and Leads to Learning.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136(4). pp. 539–550. Susan Wagner Cook, Zachary Mitchell, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2008. “Gesturing Makes Learning Last.” Cognition 106(2). pp. 1047–1058.
“up there”: David McNeill. 2006. “Gesture and Communication.” In J. L. Mey, ed., Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Elsevier. pp. 299–307.
Less than one in a thousand: Ben Medlock and Gretchen McCulloch. 2016. “The Linguistic Secrets Found in Billions of Emoji.” Presented at SXSW, March 11–20, 2016, Austin, Texas. www.slideshare.net/SwiftKey/the-linguistic-secrets-found-in-billions-of-emoji-sxsw-2016-presentation-59956212.
enjoy texting them messages: Gretchen McCulloch. January 1, 2019. “Children Are Using Emoji for Digital-Age Language Learning.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/children-emoji-language-learning/.
These repetitive gestures: David McNeill. 2006. “Gesture and Communication.” In J. L. Mey, ed., Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Elsevier. pp. 299–307.
Emoji have the same rhythmic: Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. 2018. “Emoji Grammar as Beat Gestures.” Presented at Emoji 2018: 1st International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media, co-located with the 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-18), June 25, 2018, Palo Alto, California.
Comedian Robin Thede: Robin Thede. March 17, 2016. “Women’s History Month Report: Black Lady Sign Language.” The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. www.youtube.com/watch?v=34PjKtcVhVE.
writer Kara Brown: Kara Brown. April 6, 2016. “Your Twitter Trend Analysis Is Not Deep, and It’s Probably Wrong.” Jezebel. jezebel.com/your-twitter-trend-analysis-is-not-deep-and-it-s-proba-1769411909.
spreading to mainstream Twitter: Chaédria LaBouvier. May 16, 2017. “The Clap and the Clap Back: How Twitter Erased Black Culture from an Emoji.” Motherboard. motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jpyajg/the-clap-and-the-clap-back-how-twitter-erased-black-culture-from-an-emoji.
Medieval scribes illustrated: (No author cited.) September 26, 2013. “Knight v Snail.” British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog. britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html.
the first English printers: D. G. Scragg. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester University Press.
It was in widespread use: William H. Sherman. 2005. “Toward a History of the Manicule.” In Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Gile Mandebrote, eds., Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Readi
ng. Oak Knoll Press and The British Library. pp. 19–48. William H. Sherman. 2010. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. University of Pennsylvania Press.
stylized arrow shape: Robert J. Finkel. April 1, 2015. “History of the Arrow.” American Printing History Association. printinghistory.org/arrow/. Robert J. Finkel. 2011. “Up Down Left Right.” Master’s thesis, University of Florida.
doodles were popular: (No author cited.) (No date cited.) Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground - Introduction. British Library Online Gallery. www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/alice/accessible/introduction.html.
Sylvia Plath: Maria Popova. November 6, 2013. “Sylvia Plath’s Unseen Drawings, Edited by Her Daughter and Illuminated in Her Private Letters.” Brain Pickings. www.brainpickings.org/2013/11/06/sylvia-plath-drawings-2/. Richard Watts. October 27, 2016. “UVic Purchases Rare Volume of Plath Novel, plus Doodles for $8,500 US.” Times Colonist (Victoria, BC, Canada). www.timescolonist.com/news/local/uvic-purchases-rare-volume-of-plath-novel-plus-doodles-for-8-500-us-1.2374834.
The ASCII art: Patrick Gillespie. Text to ASCII Art Generator. patorjk.com. patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&h=2&f=Standard&t=ASCII%20art.
professor named Scott Fahlman: Scott E. Fahlman. September 19, 1982. “Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed.” Carnegie Mellon University messageboards. www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm.
The idea of a simplified smiling face: The first round black-on-yellow smiley face is generally attributed to a graphic artist named Harvey Ross Ball, who created it for an employee morale-boosting campaign at an insurance company in 1963. But other simplified smiling faces are found even earlier. Jimmy Stamp. March 13, 2013. “Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?” Smithsonian. www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/who-really-invented-the-smiley-face-2058483/. Luke Stark and Kate Crawford. 2015. “The Conservatism of Emoji: Work, Affect, and Communication.” Social Media + Society 1(11).
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