MY TEXTING style is pretty salty. I curse a lot, generally in a friendly way, but my phone’s autocomplete functionality is really cramping my style. No, I didn’t mean “duck”. I wasn’t typing “fick”, “five”, “dock” or (when my poor algorithm gets desperate) “Fuchs”. You know what I wanted to say, dear reader, and it’s one of the most commonly spoken words in English. And yet I have to correct my phone’s autocorrection to write it.
I’m not the only one with this problem. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, whose new book Because Internet is a fascinating exploration of how the internet is changing our language, points out that spellcheckers have quite literally divided nations.
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Although the spellings “accessorize” and “accessorise” are both technically correct in British English, localized spellcheck programs had to settle on one, and so programmers chose the “ise” ending. Writing this in the US, I’m getting an angry red line under “accessorise” because my localized spellchecker was programmed to prefer “ize”. As a result, says McCulloch, people in the UK are now convinced there is only one proper spelling of any of a number of words that end in “ise”, even though that’s not grammatically true.
McCulloch has tracked the evolution of internet language across generations, starting with “Old Internet People” who came of age in 1980s forums like Usenet, and ending with “Post-Internet People” whose parents had Facebook before they did. Despite everything that has changed, one thing has remained steady: “lol”, which started as all-caps LOL (laughing out loud) in 1980s chat forums, and has now taken on so many subtleties that several linguists have subjected it to study.
Ultimately what they found was that young internet users add “lol” to sentences where they want to indicate a second layer of meaning. Sometimes it signals sarcasm (studying is fun lol), but at other times it is meant to soften what could seem like an insult (don’t be a git lol) or for half-serious flirting (u r cute lol). “Lol” has come to stand in for what McCulloch calls “nervous laughter, social laughter, and polite smiles”.
The thicket of meaning that has grown up around “lol” is nothing compared with the complexity of emoji. What does the exploding head emoji mean? How about the X-eye face? Is it dead or drunk or both? And let’s not even start on the eggplant, the upside-down red triangle and clapping hands in between every word in a sentence.
“What does the exploding head emoji mean? And let’s not even start on the upside-down red triangle”
Chinese artist Xu Bing wrote an entire novel in emoji and international symbols called Book from the Ground, which he claimed anyone can understand. Meanwhile, cultural critics worry that limit our ability to express emotion by forcing us to use symbols of consumer capitalism (high-heeled shoes, men in suits, purses, cocktail glasses) to say how we feel. Even if you don’t buy that, there’s no denying that emoji paralysis – that uncertain feeling as you hover between picking the super smiley face and the semi-smiley face – is real. Emoji sometimes trap us into expressing feelings we aren’t sure we have.
These issues are heightened on social apps like TikTok, which allows users to shoot 15 seconds of video and set it to pop music. With its parent company claiming a billion users, is one of the world’s fastest growing social media fads among people under 25. TikTokers communicate entirely by sharing videos, usually with music as a major component.
For people without TikTok, though, there’s an old-fashioned version of the same thing. Gifs, or short animations on loop, have become the flashier version of emoji everywhere from Slack to instant messaging apps. Some Twitter threads consist entirely of people posting gifs at each other. One firm, Giphy, provides most of the gifs that pop up helpfully when you’re searching for the perfect vid to express your emotions.
Although many of us use every day, few realize what its ultimate goal is. Eventually it wants to monetize gifs, and the easiest way to do it will be to supply branded ones. So the next time you are texting your friends and you search for an animation of Iron Man raising his eyebrows and expressing your dubious feelings, you may wind up inserting an ad for Disney’s Marvel Studios into what you thought was just a funny exchange with a pal.
So far, no firm has been able to turn chat into an advertising platform like Facebook, but Giphy is hoping to. Now your emotions won’t just be turned into little smiling faces, or wacky videos set to music. They will be branded and monetized.
