Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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A book on internet language trends by a professional linguist. The book is truly exceptional not only for the linguistic content (which is excellent and deep), but also because it serves as a short-form cultural history of the internet. That is to say, in explaining the stages of linguistic development on the internet, the author also effectively describes the various cohorts composing internet culture and their origins. The book also contains one of the best relatively compact histories of the meme I've read (despite being up to my neck in it from the beginning). This is a rare non-fiction book that I felt explained something about my identity that I hadn't fully realized; it explained myself to me.

My only cavill, and its a small one, is that the author is polemically descriptivist. To be clear, I would expect nothing else from a linguist, and I can't really quibble with most of her conclusions or her enthusiasm. But she periodically goes on the attack against prescriptivist viewpoints, and, in those moments, seems to be fighting with straw men. The tone of those sections is also kind of hectoring, which is offputting even though I mostly agree with her (I'd say I'm essentially a descriptivist, though in some areas, like language instruction, I'm a soft prescriptivist). Not to put too fine a point on it, but she can be pretty darned prescriptive about her descriptivism.

I obviously have some bias because of my profession in general and job in particular. I have fairly serious conceptual commitments to normative rules, formal writing, and normativity in writing in particular. That said, I'm also a long-term internet participant (what she calls an Old Internet Person) and I'm consistently delighted by the varieties of new linguistic experimentation on the Internet. Some of the innovation seems very clever to me while some of it seems doofy or clumsy, but those are aesthetic or tactical judgments. I don't object to any of it because it's wrong or incorrect. The internet is a place where linguistic experimentation is encouraged and enjoyed, and I think prescriptivism (to the extent it has value) is necessarily context dependent.

One context that I think its useful to take a prescriptive approach is in language instruction specifically. There, it's a little like learning traffic rules, like which side of the road you drive on. There's no moral valence to whether we drive on the left or right, it only matters that we agree on which side. I think prescriptive language instruction can have that kind of organizing effect, and consensus can be just as important in communication as it is in traffic. When agreement breaks down you can wind up in a situation where there's no safe way to communicate (like the "passive-aggressive period" the author describes, or the name of the city Derry/Londonderry).

As an argument against a purely descriptive approach, consider the humble wall of text. It's a help forum/social media phenomena consisting of an earnest, lengthy string of words¹ devoid of sentence or paragraph breaks, and sometimes even devoid of punctuation. Anyone who has been on the internet for long has seen numerous such walls, and the most common reaction is to simply not read them. The fact that the impassioned wall-of-texteur is urgently trying to communicate something is evident, but the format just results in most people ignoring the communication.

While the wall is a common and descriptively valid method of communicating, it is not effective because it breaks shared rules about how we communicate and show respect for our interlocutor's time and attention. That is to say, organizing one's thoughts to a minimal extent (using white space and punctuation) is a norm of communication, which one violates at the peril of being ignored.

In outline, that's my case for a softly prescriptive approach to language instruction: there are shared norms whether we want them to be there or not, and effective communication requires understanding and engaging with them. It's worthwhile learning and teaching effective communication strategies rather than just teaching what "is", because not everything that "is" is a helpful communication strategy.

My crankiness aside, the author engages deeply with language norms, and does an elegant job of exploring them. So elegant in fact that I learned I'd been unwittingly sending the wrong message to some folks in my own informal writing because certain norms have shifted in the years since I concluded my own language instruction. I'm grateful to the author for laying out the contours of so many shifts so that I can get back to driving on the "right" side of the road, so to speak. Interestingly, some of the changing norms I had drifted into, but was not fully certain whether what I was doing was part of a shared experience (like the drift from "hello" to "hey" as a salutation) or was just idiosyncratic.

I would recommend the book to anyone at all, it is excellent.