Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
I have been on twitter for a distressingly long time—not quite as long as I’ve been paying off my student loans (both acts representing relentless voids of futility)—but one of the greatest joys I’ve found over the years is a linguistic game that I play with myself. When I see a new acronym or slang or meme-of-the-day, I do no intentional research to decipher it. I let the timeline wash over me; it deigns to teach me, or it does not. Sometimes context clues will be enough, sometimes I’ll understand the concept without knowing the specifics for months (I knew what “bae” meant without knowing it was an acronym for months), and sometimes it’ll come and go without me really knowing what I was looking at, at all.
If this is the type of game that sounds fun to you, take a linguistics course! Or, read Because Internet: Undersanding the New Rules of Language. As far as the ongoing status of my game-playing, there are two times that I have failed that haunt me. The first was complete surrender–I googled it after months of shifting my own contextual understanding without being able to crack it–and the second, even now, I don’t think I can define completely.
The failure was “TIL”. TIL never had context. It always popped up in something like “TIL moths have feelings” or “TIL nails and screws aren’t interchangeable :O”, or “TIL Toni Morrison didn’t sing Big Yellow Taxi”. It didn’t go away so I had to create my own definition, which I guess I thought meant something like “until today this is what I thought about [blank].” Maybe. Well, whatever I thought it was, “Today I Learned” was not it. No one I saw ever typed it out, no one ever parenthetically translated it for us olds, and the trailing information was either so obvious (to me) or esoteric (also to me) that I couldn’t form any sort of cogent paradigm for the header.
The other is “based.” When I read it, I still feel slightly unbalanced. If I were to deploy it in a sentence, it would be slightly off-target in the same nuance-bleached way that saying “mood” doesn’t come in the correct teenage context of, “I can relate to how you feel about what just happened.” For the over-30 crowd, we kind of flop it out there in a bland sense of, “Oh, yeah, this conveys feeling in some way.” Some dropped an ice cream; that’s mood all right. Do I want to know the etymology of “based”? Yes, yes I do. Do I understand that it means “good” to some varying degree? Also yes. But I cannot give any more details, and so I would certainly use it in a context that would betray my age and/or unhipness.
And yes, researching “mood” for a class and discovering that there is basically an age divide in how people understand and use it makes me fear that there are many times I think I’ve won my internet-linguistic-analysis game, but am sitting in gentleman C’s territory. How uncanny, to watch someone say “I was pretty sus of him” on The Circle and be rather confident that a) sus is out already and b) sus isn’t something you do (verb), it’s something you are (noun). “That dude is sus.” Regardless, my game continues apace; maybe someday I will reach an understanding with “based” that is close enough to deploy it tangentially, enough to get it past the cool-internet-people-filters. That would be a big mood, for me (noooooo that’s an old person way to deploy “mood” :( )
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language might have saved me, at least from quitting on TIL: today I learned was typed out in a litany of other acronyms that I did understand: “as far as I know”; “in my opinion”; “that feeling when.” But the book does so much more than just act as a batteryless Know Your Meme that you can smack someone with–the author is a linguist, and she deploys her knowledge to bring underlying connections and historical trends to light. This is the internet culture version of the expertise allegory from the book Color, where the author knows enough about the historical cobalt trade in China to date the vases by the vibrancy of their blues. Because internet can (and does!) tell me why my mom’s text messages come across as so very sinister:
Hey.
How’s it going….
Just wondering if you wanted to chat sometime this week….maybe tuesday….?
For some, it reads as a compromise between the new text messaging linebreak style and the older dot dot dot. But if you’re solidly in the linebreak camp, you see those extra dots or even just a single period where a linebreak or message break would have sufficed, and assume that anything that takes more effort than necessary is a potential message. The dots must be indicating something left unsaid: “how’s it going [there’s something I’m not telling you].” The most common assumptions are either passive aggression or sheer confusion.
I mentioned that I discovered my old-person understanding of “mood” through a class, and that self-same linguistics course allowed me to observe, in real time, as at least a half-dozen late-teen/twenty-somethings shuddered when the professor gave a the example of someone texting you back just, “OK.” That period…should not be there. As the book says, “The added weight of the period is a natural way to talk about weighty matters.” And in this example, it is a third of the characters of the entire message! Surely it means something. And that something is not happiness. It is, “Ok, and I don’t want to talk about whatever it is we were talking about any more.” At least, it is to me. Maybe I should make sure my wife is on the same linguistic playbook…?
There is as much detail packed into every page of Because Internet as there is meaning packed into a period at the end of a short text message. Sometimes having information bursting at the seams means there is little room for authorial voice, quirky digressions, or the myriad other pleasantries that make modern non-fiction fun to read. Not so Because Internet. Maybe because I love Internet Culture Books (note the capital letters? I used to assume this was a convention of SFF [double brackets, but I won’t make you play my twitter game if you don’t know SFF is Science Fiction & Fantasy] genre when talking about Talents or Powers or Magic, but it tends to be deployed in writing across styles to convey impact!), but the author finds a way to push voice and appealing examples on every page.
She has a lot of experience writing on the internet! And, increasingly, so do we all. Everyone texts, so you better start thinking about what you’re saying with what you’re typing:
The basic smile emoticon :) or emoji 😀…can soften other kinds of harsh statements: making a demand into a softer request, or a seeming insult into softer teasing. As psychologist Monica Ann Riordan points out, saying an insult plus a smiley doesn’t mean smiling while insulting someone, or being happy about how terrible someone is: they smiley changes the intention behind the whole insult into a joke.
Can you image reading a text that said, “Whoa, you’re bad at this 😀” and thinking, “This person is just giddy with the cruelty towards me.”? Emojis and emoticons are so useful—if I had to name a “best” part of the book, having their history available is it; the importance of knowingthat they didn’t exist for all time allows one to uncover their genesis before that information fades into obscurity. And while I heard someone in my class posit that perhaps emojis and emoticons are watering down our ability to convey emotions solely through words, I think our class responded correctly: 👀😓💆🏽👯👯👯👯
Rather than think about emoticons as emotional, they argue, we should think about them as deliberate cues to the intention of what we’re saying. Sometimes that intention does align with an emotion: if you say “I got the job :)” you’re indicating that you’re happy about it. But sometimes you put on a polite social smile during a customer service interaction, even if you’re having a terrible say, just to make things proceed smoother. A smiley face might be used in a context like “I’m looking for some suggestions :)”—you might be anxious rather than happy about requesting feedback, but you’re using the smiley to make the request more polite.
The quest for politeness in a very blunt medium is, I propose, the reason why every email I write or message board post I make is lousy with exclamation points. Buuuuuut, if you look back on this review, there are barely any! [and rising apparently! {ahhh, recursive exclamation trap!!} ]. Is that because I can edit and rewrite (and rewrite and rewrite) this website? Because it goes out to the nebulous concept of “internet” rather than directed at one person? Perhaps I have a freer hand to use colloquial language, off-book formatting, and less concern someone is going to misunderstand me when I know they’ve come here voluntarily? Whatever the reason, Because Internet does what all great non-fiction books do: give you answers that allow you to find more questions.
If you’re reading things on the internet—and I know you are—then do yourself a favor and scoop up this book. It is a historical look at linguistic patterns online (remember when it was “on line”?). It is a timeless deep dive into the mind of an expert-level linguist: “Like I can listen to a person’s vowels and plot out which parts of the mouth it takes to make them and where that means they might have lived, thanks to my linguistic training, I could also learn to spot the different kinds of gestures and what each was for.” It is a snapshot of current trends: “This defies predictions that digital natives would pick up technological skills as easily as speaking. Rather, “computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.” Except for that prepositional “because” in the title: in 2022, that has withered and died on the slang vine. 😎