Who here has seen Harvey, anyone? The old movie where Jimmy Stewart has an invisible friend that is a six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey, and this friendship causes some anxiety to his friends and relations? I ask because there’s a scene late in the movie where Jimmy Stewart says, “In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
A of all, I am pleased to have quoted him. Secondly, this moment from the movie Harvey exactly sums up my approach to language. For years I was smart (by which you should understand I mean prescriptive). I recommend pleasant (by which I mean descriptive). Not only has this mental alteration molded me into the sort of person who is delighted by most shifts in language,1 but it has also primed the pump most gloriously for Gretchen McCulloch’s book on internet linguistics, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.
As someone who is Extremely Online, I am definitely the target audience for this book — McCulloch is exploring how we got to where we are in the world of internet language, with Twitter as one of her main sources (because it’s easy to search). But while the book feels pleasantly relevant to my interests when it’s breaking down the reason we like the Distracted Boyfriend meme, it truly becomes fascinating when McCulloch ventures into territory that’s new to me. The stuff I’m familiar with is brilliant, of course, and features the kind of zany inventiveness that I come to the internet for. But when I got to the bit in chapter one where she explains the internet-exclusive Arabic romanization system Arabizi, I was so overcome with delight that I had to close the book and hide it from myself and come back to it later.
(This was in, um, July 2019. As you can see, it is now much much later. The section about Arabizi was just very fucking cool and also I really love linguistic innovation so I don’t know what you want from me.)
(Ooh, would it be funny if I started every paragraph saying “Because Internet is at its best when”? You would understand that I meant it is always at its best because it is, inherently, best.)
Because Internet is at its best when excavating the history of some of our internet linguistic traditions. For instance, she offers a brief timeline of a thing I had never thought to seek a timeline of before, i.e., the use of repeating letters to add emphasis. The earliest example she was able to find comes from an 1848 novel, but it’s wildly an outlier, with the bulk of subsequent examples beginning at the turn of the century. This is astonishing news to me, a person who cannot remember the last time she went longer than 24 hours with using repeated letters to add emphasis. I am not sure I would be able to find a substantial corpus of four waking hours in a row in which I did not use repeated letters to add emphasis. The “awwwwws” alone! And this is but one element that McCulloch explores about how we convey tone of voice in the atonal medium of internet communication. There are, like, zillions more, from glitch-text to ironic capitals to variant punctuation.
Because Internet is at its best (really this time!) when finally goddamn explaining why old people put so many ellipses in their text messages and emails. (My parents do not do this, thank God.) This is a question I have been asking myself for years, and McCulloch just tells you the answer! I won’t spoil it for you. The mystery of why do old people use so many ellipses is the reason I bought the book, and maybe it will work that way for you too.
(I actually hate the jokey repetition plan I came up with. Why would I do that to myself? Ugh.)
In the chapter on memes (there’s a chapter on memes!), McCulloch cites a study on the commonalities among YouTube videos that spawned memes. One of the chief things that meme-spawning videos had that non-meme-spawning videos didn’t was a certain amateurishness, and the study’s author argues that it’s the unfinished, unpolished nature of those videos that made them appealing for reproduction and reuse. McCulloch argues that “incoherent language or bad photoshop accomplishes the same thing” — which is interesting on its own but very interesting with regards to the impulse to make fanfic of a thing. The feeling that the canon has gone wrong and needs to be fixed has to be a driving motivator behind writing fic, no? IT IS EXACTLY LIKE MEMES. God I love the internet.
Maybe the actual best thing about Because Internet (see, I switched up the phrasing) is that Gretchen McCulloch fucking loves the internet. It is a lovely, refreshing change. Much of what I read about the internet and the Extremely Online of this world is very hand-wring-y and distressed, and it was great to have some of the brilliant, creative weirdness of the internet celebrated by someone who hella knows what she’s talking about. “Language,” McCulloch concludes, “is the ultimate participatory democracy…. Language is humanity’s most spectacular open sources project.”
(heart emoji)
- Like everyone, I have a few old-fashioned things that language is evolving away from that I want to keep. ↩