Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

The exclamation mark is frequently repurposed to indicate warmth or sincerity, rather than just excitement. After all, to be excited to meet someone or help someone is also to be sincere about it.

One type of writing hasn’t replaced the other: the “Happy Birthday” text message hasn’t killed the diplomatic treaty. What’s changed is that writing now comes in both formal and informal versions, just as speaking has for so long.

social networking sites that prompt you to interact with denser ties—people you already know and friends of friends—tend to be less linguistically innovative.

hashtag or funny video going viral is an example of the power of weak ties—when the same thing is shared only through strong ties, it ends up merely as an inside joke.

words and books to us cut off from the living people who created them,

A more common typographical tool is asterisks and underscores as a way of emphasizing in environments that don’t support proper bold or italic. But asterisks also look like tiny stars, and early internet denizens seized on their decorative potential as well, especially when combined with the fanciful swoop

Finally, social groups also need to be organized at levels more fluid and granular than an entire platform, including both large, open options like hashtags and public groups, and small, closed options like groupchats or secret groups.

It’s not just that we make patterns. It’s that even when we’re not trying to make patterns, when we think we’re just a billion monkeys mashing incoherently on a billion keyboards, we’re social monkeys—we can’t help but notice each other and respond to each other.

Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them by switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling words.