Does that mean as someone who was 8 when the internet became somewhat purchasable by the common man (AOL came into existence, $3/hr) that I was part of creating a new language? XD
not just words, either, we've incorporated memes and gifs into our lexicon. you can have entire conversations in gif names, like the metaphor aliens from Star Trek. if you drop "troy with pizza.gif" people of our internet generation are all gonna know what you mean
and then you have ways of speaking this language that depend largely on where online you hang out the most, or even what fandoms you're in, like regional dialects/accents
and of course, there are weird remnants of older versions of internet speak that hang on with some of us, like how I still frequently use lol as if it were punctuation, lol
sᴏғᴛ ɢɪʀʟɪᴇ🌵
: god, this, and it also depends so much on who it's coming from too. like with people who I know usually don't use those or are always typing like like "hey lemme tell you why that's bs" or something
I'd never even thought about that before. But I also almost never use one word sentence messages, unless it's a question ("yes?") or an exclamation ("yes!")
Yeah, it's that linguistic evolutionary sort of thing where it's part just finding way to mark things we already do, and part the development of new terms and turns of phrase, and together those who don't know it have trouble reading it
Emotional inflection is a good way to word it. It's somewhere between tone and that... yeah, the difference between how it's said aloud and how it's thought
Okay so a full stop could a hard stop which can express... semi negative things but what's a ".." and does "..." mean anything other than trailing off or pausing to think?
the irony is that while they talk about rules they also forget that every language had dialects with differing rules and that are often regional to actual location or to digital location
I'm starting to feel like a lot of the newest generation of memes are far more... if you weren't there, you don't really have much of chance to get it? They're far more dependant on context, I think?
like, there are Boomer Memes for the older crowd, and one of the Discords I hang out in co-opted them by just cropping out the punchlines so what you get is a sepia-toned filter of middle-aged white males with absurdist captions
I feel like there's a shift from more absurdist humor (aka, Monty Python's level of "what is even anything") to more ... shit the guy who just signed a urinal level of things.
So you get a lot of "I took this totally normal thing a person said and replaced their face with this other person's face" where... the original situation is kinda... generic? So there's not really the contrast.
(aka, the recent Bernie meme that was some generic "I am asking you again" statement that I could not for the life of me understand how that became a meme)
(Somewhere there's pile of academic research on the evolutions of memes and the tug of war between people who meme and corporations trying to co-op memes for their own means that I'm pretty sure are shaping this current crop of em)
something that makes no goddamn sense by the time it gets to you can usually be found there with context to give you the flavor/tone of what youre looking at
One thing I've been seeing recently is "ye" as some kind of acknowledgement or something, I think? Not sure quite what it means. I assume it must be as specific as "ayuh" in Maine, but I can't figure out the specificity from context...
maybe that's due to how often "yeah" is kiiinda dismissive? Esp if "yeah yeah" but like "ye ye" is closer to agreement with excitement? More likely to be positive than any other connotation
we don't stop using yes because we have yeah, yes just gets more formal. but then yeah isn't enough so we pick up ye, and yes and yeah resultantly have more formal or less excited moods
Since like, in some registers like talking to parents/bosses/grandparents if you try to use more "standard English" its still ok? But those registers are typically the more formal onee
Yeeee that kind of yes(.) is also kinda a different yes than just agreement, since it's sort of adding firmness? To what you said even tho it isn't considered a typical response for older forms of english
comma-ellipses feel more....nervous? even if it's joking nervous. maybe because I usually see it in the context of statements like "characters,,,,,,holding hands,,,,,,,,,,, swears"
see "..." feels the most formal and potentially-negative to me, causes me a lot of anxiety. I noticed that without meaning to, if I use an ellipsis in a tag it'll be four rather than three.
:0 I think that's why my friend does ,,, but he also isn't in this particular scene Anxiety feeding new punctuation communication is probs whats up with a lot of it tho
normally when I'm using a "..." it's a "so if I were saying this aloud I would pause here because... reasons?" (to, ya know, use the thing itself in the explanation of the thing.)
(there's not much brain to text filter to start with so paying attention to how many dots is kinda... if I'm tagging/posting somewhere? I;ll put in 3 and just 3, but just talking...? I just kinda. Go? IDK?
where as if I use more than like... 3 or 4 in like a long "........" that implies that the end of that is a WTF. ..... which I normally just type out anyway cause why leave that hanging.
mmm yeah it's the ??? of do our representations of our speaking style in text come across correctly when read by others but like, frequent in all forms of communication thwt
So if you say something that could be read as dismissive or rude, but just mean it in a way that points out the absurdity of the situation or something, but not necessarily rejecting it.
either that or I'm too old to get the newer ones and just prefer the absurdist humor of shoving Nyancat in random thingsI am asking you again for your Pikachuwas pretty funnyAnxiety feeding new punctuation communication is probs whats up with a lot of it tho
Like letter/punctuation ratio type things