“Does one stan an object?” I asked the Ringer copy desk earlier this year. “Or does one stan for an object?” I was copyediting a True Detective deep dive by Miles Surrey, who’d written:
There is also an overarching connection to the [show’s] seasons thanks to Robert W. Chambers and H.P. Lovecraft—two authors [creator Nic] Pizzolatto, as the kids say, clearly stans.
The problem wasn’t the word itself, which we had been using since The Ringer’s inception. Stan entered the popular lexicon soon after Eminem’s 2000 song about the intersection of toxic masculinity and fandom, and had become verbified by 2008. Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary just earlier this year. But what was correct in 2019? To stan or to stan for?
My boss polled some of the younger staffers. The answer was a resounding “Either tbh.”
As stewards of writing on the internet, the copy desk frequently juggles newer language trends with more formal writing. In addition to changing “kinda” to “kind of” or adjusting to “don’t @ me,” we’ve tackled Twitter idioms, wrestled with overembellished movie titles, and instituted a controversial soft ban on calling dogs “very good.” But the “stan” episode also revealed how quickly language changes online. All of The Ringer’s 2016 uses of stan (v.) are, in fact, followed by “for.”
In a new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books), linguist Gretchen McCulloch investigates these very issues of slang and syntax. Part Linguistics 101, part social history of the internet, Because Internet revels in digital language deconstruction, exploring not just the evolving language of online informal writing—tweets, text messages, Instagram comments, etc.—but also providing cultural context for what these new modes of writing mean. More importantly, she doesn’t just appreciate internet language, she celebrates it—explaining why it’s OK for the dictionary to add stan and showing that internetspeak isn’t inherently regressive.
McCulloch’s inclusive approach has not always been the prevailing attitude. Cartoons like this or this exemplify the pearl-clutching from the aughts that presumed texting and tweeting were dumbing down language and creating a new generation of screen-obsessed illiterates. A 2006 study analyzed 101 English-language news articles from 2001 to 2005 that dealt with young people, language, and new technology and found that the media described “computer-mediated discourse” in hyperbolic, pessimistic terms: reprehensible, frightening, depraved, infamous, criminal, jarring and abrasive, apocalyptic, execrable, pointless, and aberrant. “Journalists and commentators regarded it as being inflicted on the innocent public, creating a whole new culture in the country, dumbing down the English language, and lowering standards all round.”
Linguist David Crystal picked up on similar trends. His 2008 book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, explains texting as “one of the most innovative linguistic phenomena of modern times”—which was exactly why it was causing such a moral panic. Crystal’s conclusion was that a texting-induced “impending linguistic disaster is a consequence of mythology largely created by the media.” But even linguists had their doubts about the effects of online discourse. In 2008’s Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, Naomi Baron concluded that the creeping lackadaisical approach to writing online is caused not by the technical capacities of texting or instant messaging, but by a (poorly defined) generation who “genuinely does not care about a whole range of language rules.”
McCulloch, though, isn’t studying the youths; she’s tweeting alongside them. Before delving into the community-building of memes or how emoji function on a sentence level, she lays a strong foundation by discussing the function of language in society and breaks down “internet people”—classifying folks by when they “came online” and the effect it’s had on their usage and communication. “Old internet people” coined many of the internet’s slang and acronyms from programming language, leetspeak, or in nascent chat programs. “Pre-internet people” (like my parents) are more likely to use ellipses to break up thoughts, while “full-internet” people” (me) are more likely to use those same marks ironically. Post-internet people (Gen Z) are already on video chat apps I don’t understand and will no doubt be the subject of willfully obtuse cartoons of the future.
These categories aren’t monolithic, but McCulloch’s groupings help explain why some people are “in” on the same kind of memes and internetspeak and others aren’t. Who we are, whom we perceive as our audience, and how formal we intend on being all dictate whether we feel standard punctuation or capitalization are a bug or a feature. “The difference between how people communicate in the internet era,” writes McCulloch, “is a fundamental question of attitude: Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline?” Whichever set of norms you defer to isn’t a reflection of linguistic propriety, but of how you want your message to be perceived—and by whom.
You probably make these linguistic choices all the time without even thinking—responding to your group chat with “yesssss” or using a wholesome emoji when signing off a text to your mom. If you do pause to consider tone via texting, it’s probably when your audience straddles the line between formal and informal—like dashing off a DM to your boss or sweating a Tinder missive because you’re unsure of how Online your potential date is. These small calculations are evidence of the complex rules behind the language, slang, and memeology we use online. We’ve all felt the icy sting of a text message ended with a period, typed out “haha” only to backspace and rephrase to “lol,” or quickly followed a chat message with “IDK” to indicate deference.
While reading McCulloch’s book, I began to notice my own informal writing exchanges. A 30-something millennial friend texts “Gr8”—indicating things are anything but. My boomer mother “signs” her texts. My direct messages in my work Slack are all lowercase sentences (which, as McCulloch notes, can indicate openness and approachability). But when I post in a public channel, I’m more cognizant of proper punctuation and capitalization. In my BFF group chat, exclamation marks aren’t editorial taboos but effectively units of love—the more the better!!!!!
McCulloch’s exploration of emoji is particularly instructive. While they’ve certainly embedded themselves in our online and digital speak, emoji don’t fit in the rules or boundaries of language. Those tiny pictures play the same role that gestures do when we converse—sometimes literally, like rolling your eyes or grimacing uncomfortably (both of which are in my “frequently used” emoji page), sometimes not. Tears streaming down your face, the surgical mask, or the upside-down smiling face aren’t as literal but do the same work of conveying a tone or gesture that re-colors the line of text preceding it. Illustrative emoji are emoji with more fixed definitions—when we use an airplane, a soccer ball, or a pizza slice, that’s usually what we’re trying to convey.
These new trends in communication aren’t made out of laziness—they have clear functions. A Clippers fan who tweets, “Kawhi …….,,....., welcome,” isn’t, per Baron’s analysis, indifferent to the rules of punctuation or unaware how commas work, they’re just thirsty for Lakers blood. This particular comma usage wouldn’t get published on The Ringer—at least not yet—but if it’s in the right place and it reaches its audience, then who’s to say it’s not perfectly proper?
Luckily, the media’s fearmongering around language online has died down since the early 2000s. “Is the Internet ruining English usage? lol, study says no” read a 2015 Denver Post headline. A 2011 study found a positive—not apocalypse-inducing—relationship between texting skills and literacy among Australian elementary school students. After all, you can’t break the rules of language if you don’t have a firm grasp of it to begin with. In short, the way we write online isn’t lazy, it’s creative. We’ve repurposed design elements born out of technical limitations, embraced the lowercase styling of pre-smartphone keyboards to convey mood, and create new text-based Twitter memes weekly.
McCulloch demonstrates this concept best with the internet’s sophisticated approach to irony. Whether it’s a deflated lol, a tongue-in-cheek ™, a sarcastic tilde (which, along with the asterisk, are important units of what McCulloch calls the ~*~sparkle ecosystem~*~), or SpOngEboB TyPE, internet users have and continue to find creative ways to convey irony and sarcasm.
These innovations have succeeded where past efforts at irony symbols (like a backward question mark) have failed, perhaps because a single punctuation mark wasn’t up for the job. After all, “Ironic typography is complicated because irony itself is complicated.” The reason we’re able to easily toss out complex rhetorical flourishes—and have someone else catch them on the other side—is because we’re undermining already established conventions of punctuation, capitalization, and syntax.
For all our rules, structure, and adherence to the supremacy of the style guide, linguists and copy editors—good ones—are advocates of flexibility, evolution, and rule-breaking. Few may know this better than Constance Hale, the original copy chief for Wired magazine. In 1996, Hale and the editors of Wired (then three years old) published Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. PalmPilots weren’t out yet. Full-keyboard cellphones and AOL Instant Messenger weren’t, either, let alone in the hands of children hastening the fall of Western civilization by supposedly swapping acronyms like “POS” for “parent over shoulder.”
“Wired’s dictum is simple: Write the way people talk,” wrote Hale. “Don’t insist on ‘standard’ English. Use the vernacular, especially of the world you’re writing about.” Unlike tomes that decades later would agonize about the rise of textspeak, Wired Style—with chapters like “Anticipate the Future,” “Screw the Rules,” and “Acronyms, FWIW”—was a rule book that encouraged breaking the rules.
“When it comes down to a choice between what’s on the Web and what’s in Webster’s, we tend to go with the Web,” wrote Hale. “Like new media, Wired Style is organic, evolving, and dynamic” (note that Web was still capped in ’96). Wired Style was also still clear and readable. After all, it was a style guide; Hale still had to clarify the tiny things that copy editors deal with: back up is two words as a verb but one word as a noun or adjective; close up prefixes like nano-, crypto-, tetra-. But the prose is not only intelligible, but colorful, vivid, and aside for the occasional anachronism (“ESPNET SportsZone: Web site of champions”), it reads like something from 2019—literally the future. Wired Style showed that taking risks linguistically as the world began to change was worth it, proof that online and changing language wasn’t about incoherence—instead, by leaning in, language actually came to life.
Too often, we think of language as a rarefied standard that we can only aspire to. A select group of humans—English professors, lexicographers, copy editors, etc.—hold the keys to what’s “correct.” But language changes; no one should be fixating on technicalities at the expense of prose. Memorizing a handful of rigid rules is expanding brain; galaxy brain is knowing when and how to break them. As McCulloch concludes in Because Internet, language isn’t a dusty volume, it’s a network—“humanity’s most spectacular open source project.”
For all its promise, writing online is still fraught. Black vernacular is appropriated, misused, and then declared “over” by white people. The internet, a global force, is dominated by the English language and becoming only more monolingual. Corporations use the latest online slang or meme to sell us products or blame us for the failures of late capitalism. To say the internet isn’t the unquestionable force for good it was once envisioned as is an understatement. But it hasn’t all been a wash. The web has provided spaces where we’ve made friends, formed communities, exchanged ideas, and created (or finally discovered) senses of selves. The way we write reflects that—whether it’s a private LiveJournal post, a text message to a grandparent, or 240 characters of vulnerability to a web of strangers, we want, more than anything, to be understood.
“When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better,” writes McCulloch. “We learn to write not for power, but for love.” No matter what technological developments happen or keyboard revolutions occur, nothing—not slang, not a wayward comma, not a tiny yellow picture—will gunk up language as long as we want someone else to hear what we have to say.