Last month I wrote about the dramatic, grammatic evolution of LOL, referring to two talks on texting by linguist John McWhorter in which he describes LOL’s shift from straightforward initialism (“laughing out loud”) to pragmatic particle marking empathy and shared experience.*
One of McWhorter’s talks was not online at the time, but it appeared yesterday and is well worth watching if you’re interested in texting as a form of communication:
What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That’s what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk.
McWhorter discusses the differences between speech and writing and how they bleed into one another, and he demonstrates some of texting’s emerging structures and innovations, for instance slash as a “new information marker”.
He also tackles the myth that texting implies a decline in our linguistic abilities (an argument developed in more detail in David Crystal’s book Txtng: The gr8 db8). Says McWhorter:
What we’re seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they’re using alongside their ordinary writing skills – and that means that they’re able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That’s also true of being bidialectal, and it’s certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today – not consciously, of course, but it’s an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.
LOL, the poster child of txtspk and internet lingo, began as a handy abbreviation for laughing out loud (and sometimes lots of love). But it has come to symbolise a whole mode of discourse: LOLspeak is a quasi-dialect unto itself, albeit mainly the preserve of unwitting LOLcats.
Some people even say lol offline to indicate amusement without having to go to the trouble of laughing. (I’m sure these people laugh normally, too.) But there’s more to LOL than meets the eye. Anne Curzan writes at Lingua Franca that the meaning of LOL has changed – it often doesn’t mean laughing out loud. You might have noticed this.
I’ve a new article up at Emphasis Training, a writing consultancy based in Brighton, UK. It’s about Twitter – specifically, it offers tips on how to reduce character count in tweets without sacrificing intelligibility or professionalism. (Twitter allows just 140 characters per message.)
The article looks at editing, abbreviation, punctuation, symbol use, and other areas. It’s aimed primarily at business-writing professionals but may also be of some general interest, and there’s a challenge at the end (with a small prize) for people who use the service.
Though I mention Twitter regularly here, I haven’t written about it much. So if you’ve any general thoughts on it – or tips along the same lines as my article – I’d love to hear them.
Some people have separate accounts for shop talk and personal use, but that wouldn’t suit me: too much blending has occurred! I tweet mostly about language, books, writing and editing, but I make room too for chat and miscellany. No breakfast photos, though.
Update:
Thanks to all who read the article, left comments, or took part in the challenge. Emphasis now have a follow-up article assessing the submissions and announcing a winner.
When Oxford Dictionaries named the acronym GIF (graphics interchange format) as their US word of the year (in its verb use), debates resurfaced over its correct pronunciation. The short answer is that both /gɪf/ and /dʒɪf/ are fine – you can say GIF with the hard g of gift or the soft g of gin. Or you can say the letters: “gee eye eff”.
Some people insist on soft-g GIF, as in “jif”. They say it’s “up to the creators”, and “jif” is what the format’s inventors indicated. But this presumes a non-existent authority: the creators don’t get to lay down a planet-wide law, nor does anyone on their behalf. Pronunciation develops through general agreement – it’s up to everyone who uses the term – and most people seem to prefer hard-gGIF.
Gi- is inherently ambiguous, pronunciation-wise. We have hard-g gift, gills, giddy, give and giggles, soft-ggin, giblets, Gilly, giant and gist.* (There’s a Scandinavian flavour to the hard-g set.) So it’s not surprising the pronunciation of a new gi- term would split this way. But there aren’t many gif- words apart from gift, so it’s not surprising either that hard-g GIF predominates. The g‘s origin in graphics is another factor in its favour.
But there’s no question both are acceptable: Oxford Dictionaries sanction both, as do Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary, each of them based on extensive data of what people say. There is more than one right way – there often is – and declaring otherwise doesn’t make it otherwise.
Soft-g GIF may gradually fade, or it may retain minor currency. A continued split would not be a problem. Millions of people pronounce schedule with a sh- sound; other millions go with sk-. Communication is roomy enough to contain such discrepancies, and if confusion arises people are smart and imaginative enough to figure it out. Though I can’t speak for Philosoraptor.
Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce GIF? Feel free to vote in this poll or to add your thoughts below.
‘Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?’ Eithne Duggan asked her friend.
‘Oh def.,’ Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers — white pipe-cleaners, metal clips, and pink, plastic rollers. Eithne had just taken hers out and her hair, dyed blonde, stood out, all frizzed and alarming. She reminded Mary of a moulting hen about to attempt flight.
This passage appears in Edna O’Brien’s Irish Revel, from her short story collection The Love Object (1968). I like her list of curlers and the unsparing description of Eithne’s hair, but I’m quoting it here because it contains a curious abbreviation — def. for definitely — that I don’t remember seeing in written dialogue before.
Nowadays, definitely is often abbreviated as defo by teens and 20-/30-somethings. My younger sister has introduced me to several novel clippings she and her peers use, and which are an ongoing source of familial amusement and interest. Some of what follows I owe to her; others I came across elsewhere. Some are old, some new.
Besides defo there is hilar (hilarious), wev(s) (whatever), obvs and obvo (obviously), morto (mortifying), fabbo (fabulous), abso (absolutely), natch (naturally), /kaʒ/ (casual), dodge (dodgy), and tradge (tragic) — which through semantic inflation can be used to refer to pretty much anything mildly regrettable. The exaggeration is often deliberate, and lends the utterance an ironic or tongue-in-cheek quality.
Beloved by Scrabble fans, em (/εm/) can mean the letter M or a unit of measurement in typography – hence em dash (one of which appeared just there, before hence). Occasionally em appears as an interjection, an onomatopoeic murmur equivalent to erm or um, while in HTML it italicizes text.
Em with a capital E is a popular nickname for Emma, Emily and Emmanuel, while the all-capital EM is a standard abbreviation of electromagnetic and electron microscope, among other things. Em- is a common prefix, found in words such as embark, embed, embody, emboss, embrace, and embroil.
‘Em with a preceding apostrophe is a common informal variant of them, often seen and heard in colloquial expressions such as “Set ‘em up Joe”, “Give ‘em hell”, “Up an’ at ‘em”, “Stick ‘em up”, “Ride ‘em cowboy”, “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”, “Texas hold ‘em”, “Read ‘em and weep”, and “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”. In spoken English the ‘em is usually unstressed (/əm/), and is occasionally absorbed into the associated verb, such as in the video game title “Duke Nukem”.
What is curious about ‘em is that contrary to popular belief, the apostrophe does not denote the missing letters “th”. In Middle English ‘em was an alternative form of hem (an old pronoun, not the verb, the clothing term or the throat-clearing interjection), which was later displaced by them. So ‘em does not derive from them; in fact it precedes it.
E.g. stands for exempli gratia, Latin for for example. It is used to introduce examples.
I.e. stands for id est, Latin for that is. It is used to introduce a definition or clarification.
Sometimes i.e. is used to introduce examples, but this usage is incorrect. The confusion probably arises from i.e. and e.g. having slightly similar functions.
Although the abbreviations serve their respective purposes adequately, the full English translations that is and for example are also fine in most writing contexts. Indeed, using the full forms helps avoid overuse and confusion.
Neither i.e. nor e.g. is well suited to speech, but both are recommended for parenthetical text (i.e. it is better not to use that is or for example to introduce something in parentheses). Both terms, whether abbreviated or not, are usually preceded by a comma. In American English they are often followed by a comma, and sometimes by a colon.
Something else to watch out for: since e.g. introduces a list that is representative only, it is redundant to conclude the list with etc.
RT @linguajinks: Speaking of, is there a term for words like "facepalm" that are sort of like onomatopoeia but are actions instead of sound… 18 hours ago
Posted by Stan 
