The Brilliant Stupidity of Internet Speak
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I love the way that people talk online. And on a good day, I genuinely think the internet has made people funnier and more creative. For instance, take this fairly anodyne post on X from 2023: 'Financially, whatever happened in July can't happen again.' For whatever reason, the people of the internet saw one man's budgeting struggles as a blank template for their own posts, which got stranger and more ornate as they went on—until we reached what, for me, was the post of the year: 'What happened to my ankles tonight mosquitologically can never happen again.'
'Mosquitologically'—it's so good. Over and over, we come up with amazing things to say. That is why I felt moved earlier this year to write a defense of what some call 'brain rot' language, a type of internet-inflected speech full of grammatical oddities and references to memes. I called it both mind-numbing and irresistible; when I talk the way that people talk online, I feel a little dumb, but also funny and current. Sometimes, these novel internet phrases—it's giving; if you even care—are the best way to express what I'm thinking, and so it would be counterproductive and masochistic not to use them.
But long before the internet, there was spoken slang, the result of various cultures' and identity groups' innovations. This type of language originated in the margins, my colleague Caleb Madison wrote. In 14th-to-17th-century England, many people were pushed to the fringes of society as the country transitioned to capitalism. Over time, they 'developed a secret, colorful, and ephemeral cant' to allow them to speak freely in front of law enforcement or rival groups. Throughout The Atlantic's history, writers have kept a close eye on American slang; sometimes, they've fretted about it. An un-bylined piece from a 1912 issue bemoaned the state of American conversation and the laziness of 'canned language' (apparently too many people were saying 'It is a benediction to know him' at the time). Similarly, last year, the writer Dan Brooks argued that the internet is awash in 'empty slang,' and that the country is facing a 'language crisis.'
The Brooks story distinguished between valuable slang and useless slang, a distinction that also came up in another un-bylined essay, titled just 'Slang,' from 1893. The writer posited that people use slang 'whenever one's own vocabulary falls short of the demands of one's thought.' They argued that good slang replaces 'inadequate' existing words, while bad slang is meaningless. Good slang is valuable, in the end, because it solves a problem—'Every new word which has a new meaning of its own, and is not a vain duplicate or pedantic substitute for a sufficient old one, enriches the language.'
This is not to say that all linguistic innovation should receive a warm welcome. Over the years, The Atlantic has also covered plenty of bad slang and uninspired turns of phrase, of which the internet has produced oodles. In a 2014 issue of this magazine, the writer Britt Peterson unpacked the linguistics of 'LOLspeak,' a formerly common internet dialect that has thankfully fallen out of favor in the years since. It originated from 'I Can Has Cheezburger?' cat memes—a relic from a simpler and cringier time in online history. LOLSpeak was 'meant to sound like the twisted language inside a cat's brain,' Peterson wrote, but 'ended up resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing), unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word reduplication (fastfastfast).' The rise of social media in the mid-2010s led to all sorts of experiments like this (remember the 'Because Internet' phenomenon?), many of which were similarly so annoying that they couldn't possibly last.
It's very obvious to say that language is always evolving, whether through misunderstanding or appropriation or relentless posting. But not all change lasts. We keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and what usually does are the words and phrases that are instantly intelligible, useful, and simply funny. 'Mosquitologically': Why didn't we have a word for that?
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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