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December 20, 2019 07:15 pm PST

Codifying "Boomerspeak" and debating the ethics of poking fun at it

Gretchen McCulloch is the internet's favorite linguist, whose outstanding 2019 book Because Internet explores how statistical methods can, for the first time, be applied to large amounts of informal communications, because for the first time, a huge volume of those communications are a) written and b) digital.

In a new op-ed for Wired, McCulloch discusses the 2019 man-bites-dog phenomenon of young people making fun of how old people talk (normally, the quirks of younger peoples' speech are relentlessly mocked, stereotyped and weaponized by their elders -- this is especially true of the speech of young women, see also: vocal fry, nasal talking, and upspeak).

A central tenet of McCulloch's work is that your written discourse is largely determined by when you got on the internet (and this is strongly correlated with how old you are), and there are several characteristic (or, possibly, stereotypical) elements of "Boomerspeak" that form the basis of several online communities in which young people mock their elders.

The three most obvious Boomerspeak markers are "the dot dot dot, repeated commas, and the period at the end of a text message," which are joined by "random mid-sentence capitalization, typing in all caps, double-spacing after a period, signing your name at the end of a text message, and confusion between the face with tears of joy emoji and the loudly crying emoji." I'm a Gen Xer, but I sometimes sign my text messages, but only because I frequently end up texting with near-strangers (I fucking hate texting, so when I do, it's because there's someone I need to communicate with who prefers it, and those people are generally not in my age cohort), so I don't assume I'm in their address book. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Kbmd3j31IAk/dot-dot-dot.html

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