I am, at present, in a holy city somewhere in the world, about to be married. I hope you find this news as good to you as it is to me.
While I am engaged in much good behaviour and trying desperately to do the proper honour to my soon-to-be-wife’s spiritual customs and traditions, my writing cadence has been done some understandable disruption.
The following piece is a re-worked article — available nowhere else but here — from my days working with Wonk Bridge, a tech outlet which I co-founded and in which I spent some years playing a prominent part. We founded the outlet to try and provide some remedy to the fact that there was no humanistic tech writing of a high calibre on the market. This is still largely true today; while Substack has remedied the situation somewhat, there is still no editorially unified publication which you can open week after week to find out, for instance, insights into how the internet has altered patterns of usage in the English language.
There seem, in fact, no publications capable even of determining the value of the question “What has the internet done to langauge?”, and asking it.
That’s what this article attempts to do, with hopefully some sense of fun about the activity.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my elephant has arrived.
I nurse what I must admit is a persistent paranoid suspicion that my internet service provider holds a particularly low estimation of my ability to write in a way that is, by any given modern standard, efficient, legible and correct.
The trigger behind this suspicion is that, of all of the pre-playback Youtube advertisments which I encounter while using that site of a given week, 77% on average are for the text editing companion Grammarly. The remainder of the adverts targeted to me suggest that Youtube (and whomever else) believe, rather adorably, that I am most likely female, speak German, and am living somewhere in east Asia. But that is by-the-by.
Given the degree to which my waking hours are spent writing things on internet platforms, this spate of unconscionable ad-carpeting by Grammarly led me to consider the way I structure language during these pursuits. I use a more consciously formal style here on Substack. I occasionally leave comments below the line on certain websites. I use Whatsapp’s web messenger, and I typically write messages on there in one of two registers.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, a register virtually indistinguishable from the one I use to write articles like this one (for it is my most natural mode).
The kind of grammatically pitiless text-speak — featuring occasional random lack of definite articles, unjustifiable elongation of vowel sounds for emphasis, a pronounced unwillingness to begin new messages with pronouns — that makes a kind of cubism of syntax, and mocks the idea that writing need make semantic sense at all in order to convey meaning.
I also encounter the odd-metered advertisement for Grammarly on Facebook, although the remainder of the advertising fronted to me on that platform is fairly pro forma, stuff related to my recent browsing history, and Facebook’s impression that, for instance, having just booked a stay at a hotel, the first thing now on my mind is to look at more hotel options. I can only presume, given the aggression with which Grammarly is marketed to me — which well-oversteps the limits of what is generally considered over-marketing, [1] — that Youtube has identified the ‘need’ for grammatical support in this most incorrigible of customers, and may well have availed themselves of private messenging data in order to make themselves familiar with the dimensions of that need as they see it.
Language and the Internet
The question which most interests me out of that is, not “How did Youtube come to possess this data?”, which is fairly easy to deduce, but rather, “What kind of a relationship does the internet as a whole have with language?”
For any of those among you who looked at the article’s subtitle, and wondered if it should be interpreted literally — the answer is yes, we will indeed be feeding the works of widely acclaimed masters of literature through Grammarly, and sieving through the chewed remains. Of course, it would be pique and rhetorically dishonest to take writing conceived as literature, and from bygone ages; feed them through a professional correspondence solution; and then pronounce the ensuing bloodbath commentary on the net’s contemporary relationship to language. Pitting Joyce & friends against Grammarly is obviously a joke. One of them doesn’t have a chance of beating the other, though at this point it’s hard to say which is which.
But there is truth somewhere in the jest — it is a joke which leads to a point, instead of merely decorating it. Unlike a number of other human properties, language (in form, if not in fact) is entirely the product of social conditioning. While drive to acquire language is understood to be innate, language relies entirely on social convention, learning and consensus for its shape. As a result, the form of a language, and the way in which it is used, is tied intrinsically to the character of the society using it — which makes it a subject of study as searingly clear and maddeningly opaque as one could wish for, when trying to understand what exactly is the nature of the society in which they live.
Meme Talkin’
We’ve already alluded to the fact that the internet, being its own place, makes a kind of dialect of its own out of a host language. Meme theory is especially helpful in providing a summary of one dominant informal register of language on the internet. According to “A Study of English Language Used on Social Media Memes” the linguistic register which mediates such meme time tends to be based around:
Abbreviation & Contraction
Usage of subordinate conjunctions like “When…” to begin a sentence
The use of grammatical fragments which, isolated or moved into a different context would be considered non-sequiturs, but which in the arena of a meme take on meaning by consensus.
With respect to non-verbal components of communication through the ‘language’ of memes, a vernacular of common understandings, often based on understanding of typical demographic and group behaviours, is required to parse the non-verbal components of the meme, which are both plentiful and key in successful communication via meme.
It is interesting in and of itself that, within the culture of internet memes, a set of linguistic traits which are both relatively dynamic and fairly constant have developed and lasted well beyond the lifespan of an average meme (which runs to a fraction over 4 months). For instance, the overmemes ‘No u’ or ‘When…’ have far outlasted any given meme which they have characterised, and have ostensibly become part of a common informal vernacular.
What is more interesting still is what studies of memes-as-generalised-anthropological-construct suggest about the reasons why they develop in the first place. According to Linxia & Ziran (2006), mimetic language development is driven by:
Education and knowledge impairment
Idiomatic use of words and phrases
Casual exchanges in communication
Meme talk accounts for but a single ‘net dialect’, remember. There are different prescriptions for digital business (in which the joke is formed by an infinite variety of ‘style guides’ which bear no substantial difference to one another) and online dating (in which the joke is of an entirely obscured variety, concerning which questionable PUA-esque ads Youtube will serve me with my having searched for a ‘Tinder messaging style guide’).
We can see, through the difference in our means of expressing ourselves, the way in which our social natures and our language reciprocally affect one another. In the words of the psychologist and linguist Lera Boroditsky:
“Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, […] research shows, make people think and act differently.”
There is, in other words, nothing social — nothing intellectual, philosophical or ethical — which is not first linguistic.
‘With Winged Word’
In general, the language of the internet makes roughly the same pursuit of ‘linguistic’ value (that’s to say, the use of figurative techniques[2]) as a technical manual. Much as the internet’s social constitution was essentially laid out post-war in Theodor Adorno’s flat constellational hierarchy, the nature and effects of which Wonk Bridge has discussed at length, its linguistic lineage — in English, at least — can be traced back to two writers in particular. Those two writers are George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway, the latter of whom is the namesake of a Grammarly competitor.
Orwell’s pessimistic humanism and Hemingway’s patrician cosmopolitanism have done a great deal to inform some of the net’s other most profound sensibilities as well[3], but it is for their language that they are most interesting. They are perhaps the most popular 20th century writers in the English language who are both ostensibly canonical and widely read (in the sense that their respective figures and appeals are recognisable to those who are not aficionados of good literature). Compared with their forebears of the 19th century and well before, who wrote from the privilege of a writerly retreat from wide affairs, they were men of action — eager to inspect upon the meat of war, if not the machinery of politics; full of cause; itinerant, prone to womanise. They were both journalists and had at all times, including through their fiction, the perceived need of addressing a wide and indiscriminate audience. They both, in short, saw the all-consuming purpose of their work as being communication, and both devised a set of discrete rules for the use of language in accordance with this.
No writers in English had ever codified their approach to language as thoroughly as Orwell and Hemingway did, Orwell in his Six Rules of Writing and Hemingway in his philosophy of the iceberg. Orwell’s schema can be seen below. Hemingway’s was explicitly derived from his time as a newspaperman; focus on event to the exclusion of context or interpretation (or else risk editorialising), so that only the ‘tip’ of the proverbial iceberg of overall theme shows in the final written work. It is a ‘theory’ of language which has become synonymous with literary minimalism, with literary minimalism itself being at least somewhat oxymoronical, for it is the kind of writing which admits as few writerly features — anything which would look out of place in commonplace 21st century conversation — as possible.
Refrain from the use of common metaphor; avoid lengthy words; be scrupulous in avoiding passive voice; be free of jargon. There is barely an element of these theories of writing which has not come to serve as a central pillar of the formal dialect of internet communication, the kind which prevails in both public content and private-professional correspondence. The intent behind following these rules of language is ostensibly to make use of language more communicative. That, in itself, may be something of a problem.
Communication, Consideration & Clarification
The idea ‘language is a tool of communication’ is so axiomatic that we can easily come to view it, and so language itself, in two dimensions. By thinking of language as purely a communicative tool, however, we risk overlooking the two other vital services that it provides. Language is also a tool for hewing coherent thoughts out of complex impressions, and for clarifying and delineating the bounds of problems. The former idea, which we might call ‘consideration’, is a solely first-person employment of language, the first language of the internal voice of the mind. The latter is a more impersonal form of language altogether, and might be called ‘clarification’.
The kind of language that is best adapted to perform functions of consideration or clarification is very different from that which is purely communicative. A language that is roughly as well optimised to do any of the three things involved is different from any of the ‘specialised’ kinds of language.
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