The Language of the Internet

Because Internet:  Understanding the New Rules of Language     Gretchen McCulloch     (2019)

I’ve been involved with the mechanics of language on many fronts, especially as a lexicographer (for both medieval and modern English dictionaries) and as a teacher of writing. So a book that promises to steer me through the highways and byways of internet language naturally went on my library request list. Gretchen McCulloch does not disappoint.

As a linguistics scholar with credentials in more traditional language analyses, McCulloch is able to situate internet language within a larger framework. She starts her explorations slowly, explaining the differences between formal and informal writing and distinguishing both of these from formal and informal speech. She also provides useful background on the history of the internet, while refraining from disparagement of any internet users.

For example, the “founding population, the first wave of people to go online” (68), whom she calls Old Internet People, were amazing tech innovators, whether they were hauling around punch cards in the 1960s or coding HTML in the 1990s. Old Internet People aren’t necessarily elderly in age. They’re sophisticated in their programming abilities and proud of their online history, though they may not use more recent social media like Facebook. McCulloch goes on to describe

• Full Internet People (into the social internet, especially instant messaging)

• Semi Internet People (went online for work and only dip into the social internet)

• Pre Internet People (never really connected much)

• Post Internet People (can’t remember a time when they weren’t online constantly)

Having categorized those who use internet language, McCulloch gets to the core of her analysis, with in-depth chapters on

• typography, which conveys tone

• emoticons and emoji, which communicate physical gestures

• chat and posts, which carry conversations

• memes, which are just very odd.

McCulloch makes some grand pronouncements about internet language, and I found her assertions solid and convincing:

• “From an internet linguistics perspective, language variation online is important not so much because it’s new (language has always varied), but because it’s only rarely been written down.” (56)

• “Regardless of the specific linguistic circles we hang out with online, we’re all speakers of internet language because the shape of our language is influenced by the internet as a cultural context. Every language online is becoming decentralized, getting more of its informal register written down. Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them my switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling words. All our texting and tweeting is making us better at expressing ourselves in writing.” (57)

• “More than two million people use emoji every single hour. Emoji didn’t succeed because they were a language, they succeeded because they’re not a language. Rather than try to complete with words on their home turf, emoji added a whole new system to represent a whole other layer of meaning . . . a way of representing our gestures and physical space.” (191-2)

• “The chat format’s astonishing durability signals the true birth of a new form of communication. Chat is the perfect intersection of written and informal language. . . . While emails and social media posts and website text can all lay claim to the title of informal writing by virtue of being unedited, chat is informal writing in its purest form . . . with chat, the audience is known and the time horizon is fast. The other person can literally see that you’re typing, so it’s better to just get something out there than worry about composing the perfect message.” (214-5)

• “What we’re arriving at, between typography and visuals, is a flexible set of ways to communicate our intentions and share space online. Not everyone uses every option: some people love emoji, some people prefer old-school emoticons or abbreviations, some people would rather do it with comedic timing in their vocabulary, linebreaks, and punctuation. But everyone needs something.” (195)

Because Internet is essential reading for anyone who uses the internet. I discovered, for example, that I don’t fit neatly into any one of McCulloch’s categories of Internet People. I worked for decades at a large university that was an early adopter of internet communication. I have my own website and blog. But I still follow the norms of offline authorities in my spelling and punctuation and grammar. My language seems to hybridize online and offline culture. I had to look up a few of McCulloch’s terms, but, hey, I could google them easily.

You’ll surely find some facts in Because Internet that fit your case. If you tweet frequently, you’ll learn why you punctuate the way you do. If you love Facebook, you’ll find out how your posts conform to internet language. Even if you’re not into memes, you’ll get an understanding of why others are: “The appeal of memes is the appeal of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.” (244) 

I can’t resist one final quote from Because Internet: “Language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” (267)

For another review of a book about the internet, click here.

An Unlikely Marriage

This Must Be the Place     Maggie O’Farrell     (2016)

Maggie O’Farrell trusts her readers to catch on to what’s she’s doing with her oblique plot lines. She trusts that readers won’t jump ship when she suddenly shifts the setting to another hemisphere. She especially trusts that readers will take note of her chapter titles, which include the name of the person whose point of view is adopted for that chapter, as well as the city and year in which that chapter takes place. It’s dizzying at first, but once you get used to it, there’s a bit of a reader buzz at the beginning of each chapter. Oh, now you’re in Donegal, Ireland, in 2010, with Daniel narrating in first person. Then, hello, Brooklyn 1944! It’s a third-person narrative about Teresa, who turns out to be Daniel’s mother. And welcome to Goa, India, in 1996, with a third-person narrative about Claudette, Daniel’s second wife. Decades and continents whizz past as you put the pieces of the plot together.

This Must Be the Place ends up being a character study of two people who both have immense talents and big hearts but also serious flaws. Their lives are messy, peopled by previous lovers and by children with problems of their own. Daniel Sullivan is an American linguistics professor who has lost custody of his children in a contentious divorce from his first wife. On a trip to Ireland to retrieve his grandfather’s ashes, Daniel comes across a young boy on the roadside in Donegal. This is how he meets Claudette Wells, the boy’s mother, who is a recluse in the mountains, having fled a life of international stardom and infernal paparazzi. Daniel and Claudette fall in love.

Readers get the life histories of both Daniel and Claudette through those chapters that flash back and forth in time. Some of the chapters border on gimmicky, especially the one that’s a catalog of Claudette’s personal objects that are put up for auction, complete with inset photos. Some of the plot assumptions are wobbly. I doubt that Claudette could really have kept her presence in Ireland a secret for years—in rural Africa or South America, perhaps, but not in Ireland. And I can’t see how Daniel could get work permits for whatever country he was in. None of that matters, however, as O’Farrell reveals more and more about Daniel and Claudette, drawing readers into their struggles.

Along the way, O’Farrell’s descriptive passages work well. Here is Daniel narrating: “Winter is the best season to see Paris, I’ve always thought, when the pavements are sheer with frost, when the sun in low in the sky, when the Seine is swollen and brown, twisting fibrously beneath the bridges.” (266)

And here is Daniel being described when he is in a depressive state: “He is watching the red digital numbers of his alarm clock mutate into their successors: 5 gains an extra descender on its lower-left corner to become 6; to become 7, the 6 must lose almost all of itself, all its left-hand side, all its lower and middle strokes; the only consolation, he tells the 6-soon-to-be-7, is that you’ll get them all back for the full house that is 8. He watches the numbers tot themselves up, then spill over into another hour . . .” (295)

This Must Be the Place offers particularly excellent insights into the interdependence of partners in a marriage, and the portrayals of Daniel's and Claudette’s children are moving and believable. Overall, it’s a satisfying read. I plan to watch for future offerings from O’Farrell.

Biographies of the Inklings

The Fellowship:  The Literary Lives of the Inklings     Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski     (2015)

Confession:  I find JRR Tolkien’s mythopoeic masterpiece The Lord of the Rings too dark. CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which have enchanted generations of children, hammer the Christian allegory too hard for my taste. Charles Williams’ Arthurian poems in Taliessin Through Logres are impenetrable. As for Owen Barfield, I’d heard of him only vaguely as an odd writer on anthroposophy, of which I’m not a devotee.

So why did I check out from the library a 644-page biography of these four authors?  Because Lewis’s scholarly book The Allegory of Love had enormous influence on me when I was a student of medieval literature. Lewis validated the Middle Ages as producing serious literary works, not just pieces of antiquarian interest—if you were willing to learn its tenets and culture. And my copy of Tolkien’s edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, my favorite Middle English work, has been thumbed so often that it’s falling apart. His glossary for that text, and for Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, were indispensable when I worked as a lexicographer with the Middle English Dictionary.

I thought that I might skim the Zaleskis’ book The Fellowship for bits on the relation of Lewis and Tolkien and on the context of their era at Oxford. I ended up gobbling the story of the Inklings whole, fascinated by the Zaleskis’ ability to selectively include minute detail and still maintain readability for chapter after chapter, decade after decade of the tumultuous twentieth century. The Fellowship follows the Inklings before, during, and after two world wars and innumerable academic skirmishes. The dates of the four principal Inklings reveal the scope: Lewis (1898-1963), Tolkien (1892-1973), Williams (1886-1945), and Barfield (1898-1997).

The bulk of the biography is dedicated to these four Inklings, whom the Zaleskis have wisely selected for their literary prominence. I was bemused at first about the inclusion of Barfield, since he didn’t seem to write much in the 1930s and 1940s, when the other Inklings were prolific. It turns out that, to make a living, Barfield had to spend decades toiling as a lawyer, finding little time for his own pursuits. Finally, in 1957, he was able to move into semi-retirement and spend the rest of his very long life probing issues of consciousness.

The Zaleskis had to draw a circle around the core of the Inklings, who held weekly discussions for thirty years, but other members and hangers-on enter into the narrative, too. I hadn’t expected that Lewis’s older brother Warren, called “Warnie,” would be a part of the extended group. Warnie, who struggled with alcoholism throughout his life (1895-1973), was a respected historian in his own right and assisted his brother on both practical and intellectual fronts.

Even Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) comes in for several mentions, although as a female she would not have been invited to join the Inklings. Sayers, who’s a favorite of mine, produced both scholarly works on Dante and popular murder mysteries (the Lord Peter Wimsey series).

Neville Coghill (1899-1980) and JAW Bennett (1911-1981) were other distinguished medievalists associated with the Inklings at one time or another. In fact, a fascination with the medieval period was a hallmark of much of the writing of the Inklings. As the Zaleskis tell us, “Their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.” The fields they plowed were fantasy and epic, allegory and myth, philology and theology—all rooted in the past. In 1954 Lewis gave a controversial lecture at Cambridge called “De Descriptione Temporum” (“On the Description of Eras”), in which he argued that the divisions of history into Antiquity, the Dark Ages, the Middles Ages, and the Renaissance are artificial, ignoring the continuities of Western culture. Lewis saw a much more significant break from this culture, which he revered, in the early nineteenth century, with the beginnings of modernism.

Lewis was much sought after as a speaker on ethics who was able to convey complex philosophical principles and Christian religious doctrines in simple language. I hadn’t known that he presented many well-received lecture series on the radio for the BBC, especially during World War II. The account of Tolkien’s literary life also held some surprises for me. He didn’t create Middle Earth solely as a parallel universe in which to situate his non-human characters. His larger goal was to construct an entire British mythology, comparable to that found in medieval Scandinavian literatures.

The Inklings were astonishingly hard-working and well-read, fluent in dozens of ancient, medieval, and modern languages. Yet they all had unsuccessful books, difficulties in their family lives, and crises of faith. This biography doesn’t spare the reader their blunders, their arguments, and their occasional pigheadedness. So, while fans of The Hobbit or of Perelandra will find plenty of background on the genesis of the Inklings’ writings, they’ll also find the brilliant—and flawed—Inklings in The Fellowship.