I have a very strange love-hate relationship with Facebook. Mostly because I hate how much I love it. I know deep down that my life would probably be more enriched and balanced if I didn’t spend a little bit of time each day on the Facebook. I know deep down that by not deleting my account I am simply giving into some self-serving, egotistical need to spy on people and be spied on. But I also know I am not alone. And before you go and get yourself all upset and offended, I also know there are other reasons why I use Facebook. It’s the easiest way for me to stay in touch with my friends who live all over the place. I can keep up with everyone without really keeping up with anything except a password.
But I’ve also noticed that keeping up with the Facebook has allowed me to observe certain linguistic trends. (Yeah, this is me making a super pretentious and scholarly observation about something that isn’t scholarly. Cut me some slack; I’m starting my masters this month and I need to score a few more affected points before they let me get a parking pass). But seriously, scrolling through the feed on my wall allows me to see how language is changing on a daily basis. The fact that language is this organic thing that evolves with the people that use it is one of my favorite parts about language. It’s not fixed or rigid; we can change it for our own purposes.
Once the Internet became such a huge part of the way we communicate with one another, we began to change our language more rapidly. One of the first changes I noticed was the introduction of the Emoticon. Some creative person made the first typed smiley face many years ago in an AOL chatroom for some highly specific special interest group like “Over 40 with a Green Thumb and Children.” Then somebody took that idea and ran with it. Suddenly there was the frowny-face, winky-face, kissy-face, surprised-face, worried-face, dead-face, face-face. AOL Instant Messenger even offered a scrolling menu to make the emoticon world easier to maneuver. When you think about what these emoticons did, from a literary standpoint, they become pretty powerful. What an easy way to give your sentence(ish) a tone without having to change your language at all. (This makes me happy and scares me at the same time).
Abbreviations have also become a larger part of our daily language since the timely marriage of the affordable PC and in-home internet access. I know that abbreviations were used way before the internet existed like RSVP and ASAP, but all sorts of new abbreviations came about or were at least mainstreamed because of electronic communication. BRB, TTYL, BTW, and for my fellow AOL users in the 90s a/s/l? (Anybody? Anybody?) LOL is probably my favorite because it’s one of the most widely used, but it has two possible meanings which can create awesomely awkward miscommunications. Most people agree that it means Laugh Out Loud, yet there are those that use it to mean Lots Of Love. It all works out fine if everyone is on the same page, but if someone sends a Lots of Love message to a Laugh Out Loud purist or monolinguist, mishaps are likely…and costly. “So sorry to hear about your dog. That’s just horrible. LOL!” Whoopsy Daisy.
Since Facebook has taken the privacy of the instant message and made our communications with one another even more public, it allows us to observe the way people are bending language to fit their own needs. And holy cow some of these changes are catching. Certain words have become more and more popular because of our public and electronic communication. Epic and fail and epic fail are used approximately 93% more than they were 10 years ago, mostly by people between the ages of 13-35 (I just 100% made up that statistic so you probably shouldn’t read it).
One of my favorite internet based literary devices showed up on the Facebook about a year ago and it spread pretty quickly. Suddenly everyone was using it…all the time. I got tired of it quicker than I got tired of hearing Michelle Tanner say “you got it dude." You might remember this particular method and you probably used it. You might still use it. (Don’t worry if you do. We’re still friends. Unless you used it to say something highly dramatic or personal. Then I’ve probably hidden you from my feed). It was the overuse of the period to add dramatic emphasis to whatever you were saying. Examples: (I will separate each example by a backslash because when you use periods incorrectly it is difficult to understand where one complete thought ends and another begins. Please note that the backslash is not an actual part of this nameless literary device).
It’s. Hot. / Oh. My. God. / I. Miss. You. / W. T. F. (that last one is a combination of an abbreviation and the over-placed period to help add emphasis—I told you language was changing!)
I originally enjoyed this because even though it challenges basic punctuation rules, it adds an element of incredulity to whatever was being said. People were making deliberate, authoritative, and rhetorical choices to enhance their status updates, and I loved it...until I got tired of it after about 20 minutes. Mostly it was because people started using it without any sense of purpose.
Chicken. Fingers. Honey. Mustard.
The. Movies.
The most recent internet-based literary device that I’ve noticed lately on the Facebook is less enjoyable (in my opinion) than the overused period. It also adds drama to a post that was originally less dramatic (because that’s what we all need in our lives…more drama). In order to express excitement, people tend to extend the last letter of their words.
Forrrrrr exampleeeeeee: “I am soooooooooo exciteddddddd to seeeee you this weekenddddddddddd. It’s going to be sooooooooo muchhhhhh funnnnnn!!!!!!” “Yourrrrr the besttttttttesttttt! Everrrrrrrrrrrr!”
These extra letters add a tone of unfettered (by the space bar) jubilee that cannot be captured by the appropriate and accepted number of letters that we usually associate with a particular word. I’m guilty of this on certain occasions, especially with specific letters and words. I tend to write "I love youuuuuu" instead of "I love you" because I love people too much to just use one u. Words like “so” and "really" seem to naturally lend themselves to this literary device; adverbs in general are good candidates for having their vowels and consonants repeated, which makes sense because adverbs are used to add emphasis to adjectives. It seems only natural that we would add extra emphasis to these emphasizing words. And for some reason, words that end in the letter e just seem to want this repetition. I guess it’s because e’s look so pretty sitting all together in a row. And also it’s just so fun to make this sound “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”
Just like the unneccessary period, this repeated letter business has started to get out of control; it no longer makes sense. If you don’t believe me just scroll through your news feed. Are people just so excited, and all the extra endorphins in their bodies have rendered their appendages sluggish and they can’t manage to lift their fingers off of the keys in time? And are some of these language devices making us dumber by allowing us to say more without having to learn and use new words to get our message across? Are we slowly killing some words by not using them? (Why would I say that “I’m enraged” when I could just say “I’m soooooo madddddddddd!”) It’s a form of literary kudzu spreading across our language, sucking the life out of the words it feeeeeeeeeeeds on. Crappppp!
I can’t help but wonder (as an English teacher I guess) what the internet will continue to do to our language. As more texts become digital, will these new electronically induced (who in their right mind is going to write 26 r’s at the end of the word lover if they are doing it longhand?) literary devices be properly named and studied alongside assonance, imagery, alliteration, synecdoche, and onomatopoeia? Will I discuss with my students why a writer chose to elongate the ends of certain words and not others within the same sentence, or why they chose to place 16 periods all within the same independent clause? What other ways will be manipulate our own language as we continue to create quicker and more efficient ways to capture and share our words and thoughts (even the ones that should never leave our minds). I guess I’ll just have to wait and see…eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
But I’ve also noticed that keeping up with the Facebook has allowed me to observe certain linguistic trends. (Yeah, this is me making a super pretentious and scholarly observation about something that isn’t scholarly. Cut me some slack; I’m starting my masters this month and I need to score a few more affected points before they let me get a parking pass). But seriously, scrolling through the feed on my wall allows me to see how language is changing on a daily basis. The fact that language is this organic thing that evolves with the people that use it is one of my favorite parts about language. It’s not fixed or rigid; we can change it for our own purposes.
Once the Internet became such a huge part of the way we communicate with one another, we began to change our language more rapidly. One of the first changes I noticed was the introduction of the Emoticon. Some creative person made the first typed smiley face many years ago in an AOL chatroom for some highly specific special interest group like “Over 40 with a Green Thumb and Children.” Then somebody took that idea and ran with it. Suddenly there was the frowny-face, winky-face, kissy-face, surprised-face, worried-face, dead-face, face-face. AOL Instant Messenger even offered a scrolling menu to make the emoticon world easier to maneuver. When you think about what these emoticons did, from a literary standpoint, they become pretty powerful. What an easy way to give your sentence(ish) a tone without having to change your language at all. (This makes me happy and scares me at the same time).
Abbreviations have also become a larger part of our daily language since the timely marriage of the affordable PC and in-home internet access. I know that abbreviations were used way before the internet existed like RSVP and ASAP, but all sorts of new abbreviations came about or were at least mainstreamed because of electronic communication. BRB, TTYL, BTW, and for my fellow AOL users in the 90s a/s/l? (Anybody? Anybody?) LOL is probably my favorite because it’s one of the most widely used, but it has two possible meanings which can create awesomely awkward miscommunications. Most people agree that it means Laugh Out Loud, yet there are those that use it to mean Lots Of Love. It all works out fine if everyone is on the same page, but if someone sends a Lots of Love message to a Laugh Out Loud purist or monolinguist, mishaps are likely…and costly. “So sorry to hear about your dog. That’s just horrible. LOL!” Whoopsy Daisy.
Since Facebook has taken the privacy of the instant message and made our communications with one another even more public, it allows us to observe the way people are bending language to fit their own needs. And holy cow some of these changes are catching. Certain words have become more and more popular because of our public and electronic communication. Epic and fail and epic fail are used approximately 93% more than they were 10 years ago, mostly by people between the ages of 13-35 (I just 100% made up that statistic so you probably shouldn’t read it).
One of my favorite internet based literary devices showed up on the Facebook about a year ago and it spread pretty quickly. Suddenly everyone was using it…all the time. I got tired of it quicker than I got tired of hearing Michelle Tanner say “you got it dude." You might remember this particular method and you probably used it. You might still use it. (Don’t worry if you do. We’re still friends. Unless you used it to say something highly dramatic or personal. Then I’ve probably hidden you from my feed). It was the overuse of the period to add dramatic emphasis to whatever you were saying. Examples: (I will separate each example by a backslash because when you use periods incorrectly it is difficult to understand where one complete thought ends and another begins. Please note that the backslash is not an actual part of this nameless literary device).
It’s. Hot. / Oh. My. God. / I. Miss. You. / W. T. F. (that last one is a combination of an abbreviation and the over-placed period to help add emphasis—I told you language was changing!)
I originally enjoyed this because even though it challenges basic punctuation rules, it adds an element of incredulity to whatever was being said. People were making deliberate, authoritative, and rhetorical choices to enhance their status updates, and I loved it...until I got tired of it after about 20 minutes. Mostly it was because people started using it without any sense of purpose.
Chicken. Fingers. Honey. Mustard.
The. Movies.
The most recent internet-based literary device that I’ve noticed lately on the Facebook is less enjoyable (in my opinion) than the overused period. It also adds drama to a post that was originally less dramatic (because that’s what we all need in our lives…more drama). In order to express excitement, people tend to extend the last letter of their words.
Forrrrrr exampleeeeeee: “I am soooooooooo exciteddddddd to seeeee you this weekenddddddddddd. It’s going to be sooooooooo muchhhhhh funnnnnn!!!!!!” “Yourrrrr the besttttttttesttttt! Everrrrrrrrrrrr!”
These extra letters add a tone of unfettered (by the space bar) jubilee that cannot be captured by the appropriate and accepted number of letters that we usually associate with a particular word. I’m guilty of this on certain occasions, especially with specific letters and words. I tend to write "I love youuuuuu" instead of "I love you" because I love people too much to just use one u. Words like “so” and "really" seem to naturally lend themselves to this literary device; adverbs in general are good candidates for having their vowels and consonants repeated, which makes sense because adverbs are used to add emphasis to adjectives. It seems only natural that we would add extra emphasis to these emphasizing words. And for some reason, words that end in the letter e just seem to want this repetition. I guess it’s because e’s look so pretty sitting all together in a row. And also it’s just so fun to make this sound “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”
Just like the unneccessary period, this repeated letter business has started to get out of control; it no longer makes sense. If you don’t believe me just scroll through your news feed. Are people just so excited, and all the extra endorphins in their bodies have rendered their appendages sluggish and they can’t manage to lift their fingers off of the keys in time? And are some of these language devices making us dumber by allowing us to say more without having to learn and use new words to get our message across? Are we slowly killing some words by not using them? (Why would I say that “I’m enraged” when I could just say “I’m soooooo madddddddddd!”) It’s a form of literary kudzu spreading across our language, sucking the life out of the words it feeeeeeeeeeeds on. Crappppp!
I can’t help but wonder (as an English teacher I guess) what the internet will continue to do to our language. As more texts become digital, will these new electronically induced (who in their right mind is going to write 26 r’s at the end of the word lover if they are doing it longhand?) literary devices be properly named and studied alongside assonance, imagery, alliteration, synecdoche, and onomatopoeia? Will I discuss with my students why a writer chose to elongate the ends of certain words and not others within the same sentence, or why they chose to place 16 periods all within the same independent clause? What other ways will be manipulate our own language as we continue to create quicker and more efficient ways to capture and share our words and thoughts (even the ones that should never leave our minds). I guess I’ll just have to wait and see…eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
u r so crazy! lmfao :-)
ReplyDeleteLoved it as always. As an English concentration at UNCG this makes me reallllllly. happyyyyy.
ReplyDelete