Gretchen McCulloch

THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Have you ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message? Wondered where memes came from? Fret no more: Because Internet is the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. 'McCulloch is such a disarming writer - lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject - that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.' New York Times

Understanding how language is changing

Because Internet

LOL this brings me back to that episode in Dear Hank and John where they spent like 15 minutes trying to come up with how to spell "as per uzh"

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We truncate words without regard for spelling: you can say the first syllable of “us! al" or "casual" and everyone knows what you mean, but do you write it "yooj"? “uzh"? "cazh"? "casj"?

These forms are shorter in writing, but not necessarily more efficient in speech, even though we somnetimes speak them aloud when we're talking about specialized topics: it takes longer to say "ampersand" or WWF" than “and" or "World Wildlife Fund."

So this is why when I was younger I was proud of not having a medhok accent in speaking Indonesian, but when I'm older my values change and I try harder in getting rid of my Jakartan accent instead lol

Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with the existing holders of power by talking like they do, so we can seem rich or educated or upwardly mobile. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with particular less powerful groups, to show that we belong and to seem cool, antiauthoritarian, or not stuck-up.

Because Internet quotes

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