#lingua fandom

[linguafandom]

Read This Article!!!

How many exclamation points do you need to seem genuinely enthusiastic?

Much like awesome once served a greater purpose, the exclamation point has been downgraded from a shout of alarm or intensity to a symbol that indicates politeness and friendliness. As Shipley and Schwalbe put it in their guide: “Exclamation points can instantly infuse electronic communication with human warmth.” And that’s what we use them for now.

“The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker,” says Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies online communication. “If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.”

[linguafandom]

i hate using siri to reply to messages. it listens to what i say and, if it hears me accurately, converts my thoughts into flat, expressionless, standardised prose with imperfect punctuation and no room for spelling variation. i do not want this. i don’t type short messages in lowercase, for example, because i’m lazy or don’t know how to capitalise — i type short messages in lowercase because it’s the best way to render how i imagine my thoughts would come across. i like lending writing with accurate spelling and grammar a casual veneer by decapitating the caps. plus, well, i just think it looks better. i’ve typed in lowercase ever since i first got internet access and started talking about radiohead on audiogalaxy boards fifteen years ago. it’s why i’ve turned autocorrect off on every phone i’ve ever owned. [...] we write based on our background and experiences. to strip this capability out, even from ephemeral or seemingly unimportant forms of communication, is to neuter the essence of language.

apple’s most personal device forces us all to speak the same

[linguafandom]

Anyone who’s spent a considerable amount of time in the fandom side of Tumblr is familiar with the hyperbolic, sarcastic use of “delete this” or “stop this.” It’s used by fans jokingly, in every instance I’ve observed. It’s a way of saying “this thing makes me overwhelmed with how much I love it, please make it stop”. (“Delete yourself” is much more hostile and doesn’t seem to have a semantic connection to “delete this” within fandom use.)

Before vixencyrus protected her tweets I looked through them and saw zero evidence of anything but sarcastic fandom-specific language use. She is (was?) clearly a huge fan of The Flash and of the actors, from what I could tell. So this is disappointing and I feel very sad for her. 

But what to say about this? For someone outside of fandom culture and language, “delete this” does sound hostile, negative, mean, like it’s bullying. With the open-access free-for-all of Twitter, celebrities are privy to fandom terminology that they’re almost always utterly unfamiliar with. And there is a weird streak of sarcastic meanness in a lot of fandom today: “#this is the worst” as a tag on a photoset of your favorite actor’s face; “please stop” tweeted to a favorite actor who’s instagrammed a picture of himself doing charity work; and of course “delete this” posted on photos of your favorite actors hanging out together. 

Does anyone have any input here? Any way to parse through how fandom jargon may or may not alienate the celebrities it’s meant to celebrate? 

[linguafandom]

From Metaphysics to Teen Wolf Meta: The Evolution of a Word

If you follow genre television, internet fandom, or literary criticism, you've probably heard the word "meta" used to describe everything from a narrative form, to intensive analysis of character backstories in Harry Potter. How did this Greek prefix meaning "beyond" come to mean so much to so many of us?

[destinationtoast]

The Benedict Cumberbatch fandom uses "gingerbatch" and "sherlockbatch" and "khanbatch" and the like to distinguish between different sides of the actor. Most refer to outward appearance, but not exclusively as I also see people use "sillybatch", "ramblebatch" and "musicalbatch" being used.

Ah, yes!  I am familiar with that phenomenon, as there is some crossover interest between our two fandoms. ;)  Is there much use of Cumber- as a prefix?  That also seems like it could be pretty fun as a noun modifier, anyway (cumberkhan :) ) but I haven’t seen it as much.  I’m also intrigued by the use of the ! and whether it’s going away…  is ginger!batch morphing to gingerbatch in lingua fandom, or do the two terms connote subtly different things?  Hm.

[linguafandom]

In case you missed it, Walt Wolfram did an AMA on Reddit yesterday. The parts relevant to language change/use online:

How do you think technology (and especially the internet) is influencing how language changes these days?

Now that's a BIG question. Written language can always have an impact on spoken language, and new technologies (like the internet) can certainly increase the usage and dissemination of written language. I think this is a question that Big Data style methods of research will be able to answer as time goes on. Furthermore, some of my grad students have even told me about some research that shows how the QWERTY keyboard layout and typing skills can affect language choices. So it is likely that the tools we use to write also can come into play.

Still, the fact of the matter is that written language is largely a mediated form of spoken language. So I am more inclined to think that while written language on the internet might not have a great influence on spoken language change, the internet and other new writing technologies might help in the dissemination and awareness of aspects of language change that is already taking place.

I should note that Joel Schneier has been my consultant on this question.

Might greater contact between various dialects (and to lesser extent between languages) contribute to greater homogenization of languages/dialects?

While this is a commonly expressed thought, I'm not aware of any evidence to suggest that is the case. Even if the internet can increase contact between language speakers of different dialects, each individual's spoken language patterns won't necessarily be completely changed. There might be some new lexical forms, and they might have encountered evaluative information about their language, but I am inclined to think that their spoken language system will be largely unchanged.

Plus, as history shows, language contact and dialect contact do not necessarily lead to homogenization. In fact, they more likely lead to greater and more complex heterogeneity.

Again, Joel Schneier was consulted for this :)

Much more about AAVE, sociolinguistics, and other topics at the link.

[youfoundmeonascreen-deactivated]

my two cents: having been lucky enough to be exposed to language as the internet uses it for several years now, I think ‘feels’ is one of the best nouns to fill a lexical gap in the English language. ‘I know that feel’ is one of the greatest English expressions the internet has spawned since I’ve paid attention.

[linguafandom]

i totally agree! i absolutely love it and it's become such a part of my tumblr and online language that it's already made the leap into my spoken language, even with friends who are not fluent in internet-ese. because "i understand that feeling" is stuffy. "i know that feel" is a great way of saying "i get it, man," basically.