>It makes your feeling seem universal<p>It universalizes the feeling of the writer, not the reader. Much like religion or the Effective Altruism movement, the rise of homogenized communication (image macros, rage comics, the "that moment when..." style of writing), is yet another way of obtaining the pleasant feeling of subjugating your individuality to the Great Universal. This style of communication emphasizes what is common and easily digestible about an experience, rather than what is unique, particular, peculiar. The fact that the token experience varies from communication to communication - Tinder swipes one moment, getting your class canceled the next - is irrelevant. The only emotion communicated is one that has been felt a million times before by a million people.<p>The Culture Industry [1] no longer needs to be imposed upon us from above. Our private communications have become the Culture Industry, and we are the army of laborers that keep it running.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry</a>
I liked this. Particularly:<p><i>I’m a fan of all the betentacled linguistic lifeforms that have emerged from our cambrian explosion online. These days, people write insanely more text than they did before the Internet and mobile phones came along. So the volume of experimentation is correspondingly massive and, for me, delightful. One joy of our age is watching wordplay evolve at the pace of E.coli.</i><p>and<p><i>Most of these syntax-morphing memes consist of us trying to find clever new ways to express our feelings.</i><p>The effect of image boards really is fascinating. What at first seemed to be childish screwing around is proving to be an amazing engine of new culture and language. such wow
I've been convinced by linguists (Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, etc) that it looks like evolution of syntax to convey meaning and emotions.<p>Syntax evolution isn't just introduction of old ideas like lowercase+uppercase, Capitalization rules, punctuation (spaces between words, periods & commas to mark rests & beats, etc). Syntax evolution <i>also includes</i> new strange word reorderings, deliberate word omissions, and deliberate word misspellings.<p>I disagree with the other comment about The Culture Industry as an explanation. That's not relevant. Instead, people are trying to share extra meaning (emotion, irony, etc) through extra channels of new syntax manipulation.<p>Let's say a writer wants to be sarcastic when writing out bad reasoning. Examples:<p>Congress keeps buying tanks the Army does not need. Why?<p>1) explicit labeling of concept with backreference:<p><i>"It's good because it maintains jobs. (That was sarcasm.)"</i><p>2) HTML tag inspired syntax:<p><i>"<sarcasm>It's good because it maintains jobs.</sarcasm>"</i><p>3) /s (inspired by Unix command line switch?)<p><i>"It's good because it maintains jobs. /s"</i><p>4) grammar incorrect because of missing words<p><i>"Because jobs."</i><p>(It's as if the general public is creating syntax options in English to parallel the computer language verbosity of Objective-C and Java EE to terseness of Perl and Haskell.)<p>That type of word subtraction creates an interesting abruptness that conveys to the reader a meaning of idiocy or lunacy. Similar phrases can be constructed like "because freedom" or "because science".<p>Why is the TSA now performing mandatory cavity searches of preschoolers? "Because freedom."<p>The substraction of words may have been motivated by the mechanics of 2 thumbs typing on smartphones or the Twitter 140 char limit but I think even desktop users with 100wpm typing speed have adopted it.
> It makes your feeling seem universal.<p>Rage comics, subordinate clauses, FML postings, tweets, anonymous comment threads, etc. The internet makes it easier to share the kind of tiny moments you'd never speak of. Then, suddenly, we all realized that we could all relate to them. Secret micro-shame revelation becomes a commonplace part of the modern human experience. Isn't the internet wonderful?
> Usually you can quickly deduce what the missing part would be. Maybe it’s something like You, sadly, always know what to do when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” Or maybe the full sentence that emerges in your head is more convoluted, like Nothing is more bittersweet than reflecting on the challenges of dating someone who is superficially attractive but owns a pomeranian and thus, you worry, has all sorts of dog/partner priority issues, which you can instantly intuit when you’re using a dating app and see someone when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.”<p>Or: "That dog is cute (which is more than I can say for the owner)".
I'm not an linguist but I got a feeling that 1337 speak wasn't created in last 15 years. Also it seems that the author got the historical parallel wrong because there's nothing puzzling about the complete phrase "<i>Chapter IV</i> In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Strange".
That feel when people who learned your language later in life can't understand you because you don't follow the rules they were taught.<p>Also, when you sound really dumb in about ten years.