Smarty Pants Podcast

You Never Step Into the Same Internet Twice

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch on the new rules of language

By Stephanie Bastek | July 26, 2019
Susan Murtaugh (Flickr/suzi54241)
Susan Murtaugh (Flickr/suzi54241)

Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you responded to work emails solely using ?? Is ~ this ~ your favorite punctuation mark for conveying exactly just how much you just don’t care about something? Welcome, Internet Person—you’re using a different kind of English from the previous generation. But these conversational norms weren’t set on high, and how they evolved over the past decades of Internet usage tells us a lot about how language has always been created: collaboratively. Or, as Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch puts it, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” She joins us to analyze the language we use online and off—how it got this way, where it’s going, and why it’s a good thing that our words are changing so quickly.

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