Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“It’s not that edited, formal writing has disappeared online (there are plenty of business and news sites that still write much like we did in print), it’s that it’s now surrounded by a vast sea of unedited, unfiltered words that once might have only been spoken.”

Before the internet, writing was mainly limited to school essays, published works, business correspondence, formal announcements, and postal letters. Today, people write all that and much more—texting, tweeting, blogging, and emailing—making writing much less formal and much more revealing, essentially conversations transcribed into words on a page. For linguists, it’s a chance to study how people chatter among themselves since the exchanges are now available as documents. 

“The problem is that writing is too premeditated, too likely to have gotten filtered through multiple hands, too hard to attribute to a single person’s linguistic intuitions at a specific moment. But internet writing is different. It’s unedited, it’s unfiltered, and it’s so beautifully mundane.”

Essays, magazine articles, charters, treaties, and books are composed with great care and edited, usually by several people, before being published. Internet chat, much quicker and much less formal, reads more like people talking; it contains many hints about participants’ feelings and attitudes, their words lively with subtleties. It’s not that authors can’t do this in a formally published work—they certainly can and do—but that the internet is chock-full of the informal, with its strange ability to introduce new words and give new meanings to old words. 

“Even when something looks incoherent to an outsider, even when it’s intended as incoherent for an insider, we as humans are still practically incapable of doing things without patterns. My mission with this book is to map out what some of those patterns are, to examine why they fall into the patterns that they do, and to give you the tools to look at internet language and other cutting-edge linguistic innovation through the lens of a pattern-seeker.”

We think in patterns—they’re efficient ways of chunking complex thoughts—and our writing reflects it. Internet linguists tease out these patterns to learn more about how our writing reveals the structure of our thoughts.