The Internet Is Changing the English Language. Is That a Good Thing? via Time

Because Internet

The Internet Is Changing the English Language. Is That a Good Thing?

Time:  7.18.2019 by Katy Steinmetz

For more than 600 years, English speakers used because as a conjunction meaning “for the reason that,” dutifully following it with a full clause of explanation (or at least the word of). Then, a few years ago, this old standby suddenly began bursting with new life, as people started using it to form terse, cheeky rationales in a manner that defied all grammatical decorum: How do you know climate change is real? “Because science.” Why are you sleepy? “Because burrito.” Academics went aflutter, debating whether because had evolved into a preposition and which types of nouns fit this newfangled construction. But there was little disagreement on the driving force behind the change.

The title of Gretchen McCulloch’s new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, is a homage to this kind of linguistic metamorphosis — evolution made possible by the ascendance of the web and the unprecedented explosion of informal writing that has come with it. Her aim is to explain how the Internet has shaped language, as billions of people have become authors and found ways to type out the flirtations ( 😘) and frustrations (aklefj;awkjfdsafjka!!!) and quotidian blurghs that for centuries existed only as informal speech.

McCulloch is an Internet linguist (yes, that is a real job), and her book about Internetlanguage is, fittingly, a mash-up drawn from academic and Internet cultures. She breaks down concepts like diglossia — an instance when two varieties of a language are spoken in the same community — as she casually deploys online speak like “meatspace” (the physical world, opposite to cyberspace). In some measure, Because Internet offers a history of the web, an introduction to linguistics and a survey of the most fascinating research from her field, including a study that took advantage of geotags on social media to show how new slang words spread from place to place. READ MORE >>