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Comment by duncanawoods | Hacker News Reader

I liked this. Particularly:

I’m a fan of all the betentacled linguistic lifeforms that have emerged from our cambrian explosion online. These days, people write insanely more text than they did before the Internet and mobile phones came along. So the volume of experimentation is correspondingly massive and, for me, delightful. One joy of our age is watching wordplay evolve at the pace of E.coli.

and

Most of these syntax-morphing memes consist of us trying to find clever new ways to express our feelings.

The effect of image boards really is fascinating. What at first seemed to be childish screwing around is proving to be an amazing engine of new culture and language. such wow

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I'm not convinced its not any less childish screwing around just because it generates a shared vocabulary for people. It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang and in-jokes.

I'm curious, have you ever read Shakespeare?

Because Shakespeare's slang and in-jokes are normal English today.

That's not a very compelling argument.

edit: The comparison to Shakespeare just seems kind of off, but beyond that, I never argued that the vernacular / slang being generated today wouldn't be used or become accepted by society at large.

To me, the follow 2 sentences look like they contradict each other:

>It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang

>, I never argued that the vernacular / slang being generated today wouldn't be used or become accepted by society at large.

If those 2 sentences are not contradictions, can you clarify your comment?

Isn't "accepted by society at large" part of what culture __is__ ?

Something being accepted by society does not imply progress.

You're using "progress" as a judgement of something that's "better" or "improved" ... like "technological progress".

A "language progress" is a movement in usage and meaning. We "progressed" from "thy" "thee" to "your" "you" etc. It doesn't mean the words starting with "y" are "better" or "clearer" (in fact, they are the opposite of the previous formal/informal distinctions.) Nevertheless, language/culture has moved on.

I agree with the example of the macro usage of thy->thee->you/your as being an instance of progression, but I don't see the current trends in internet slang as a parallel example of something that will have such a long lasting effect on our language as a whole, but instead, well, just what I said, I see it as a trend that will eventually be a ghost. This is a prediction, of course.

it's called pro-gress. the optimistic interpretation is for a move to the better

There is no progress. English is not better than it used to be. It was not wrong in Shakespeare's day and it's not wrong now. We have new words for new things. Adaptation is not progress.

Some of it is; others are obscure references that must be explained along with the historical context. Still others are likely lost forever.

> I'm not convinced its not any less childish screwing around just because it generates a shared vocabulary for people. It's not progress of culture or language, simply an increase of quantity of slang and in-jokes.

Why not both? Culture and language "progresses" (progress implies linearity– might be more accurate to say "develops" or "unfolds") through slang and in-jokes!

Check out linguist John McWorther's work on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter

In fact it's quite interestingly parallel to how technology often starts out as toys and games (and instruments of war and pornography).

I just fail to see the progress part here, I suppose. Maybe my view of this is daft, but the slang being created by the generation today isn't helping us say things we couldn't say before or moving anything forward - its simply the nature of slang, it constantly changes through the generations.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts about what progress has been so far. What do you feel have been works or movements or creations from the past that allowed for progress?

ah, I believe if we got into a deep conversation about that here it would be a bit of a derail. You can e-mail me at sevensharpscales at gmail dot com if you're genuinely curious about my thoughts on this subject. Personally, I don't think they'll be of much interest.

Yeah, this is what I liked about it too. I like the idea of common English evolving on time scales at which it may legitimately become mutually incomprehensible over the course of my lifetime.

Language isn't static, and I love the idea of more versatile forms with fewer rules providing new generally accepted grammars for creative writing. I also like how this change in English seems to be fascinatingly in the direction of several Asian languages where sections are dropped if they are considered obvious enough. Although English has its own charms in having so much more flexibility in word ordering, it's not as succinct in allowing for dropped sections.

I'm afraid that people who get pissed off about the singular "they" or other such conventions are going to very rapidly be incapable of communicating with younger people at all. That's fascinating to think about.

just as with many other online media, a lot of content is artificially constructed. The work going into wordplay and ironic remarks with potential for virality are not unlike what we have seen in marketing and media for a while, just at different scale.

I'm assuming that when you say "artificially constructed," you mean that groups of people are sitting down and brainstorming according to some sort of master plan, which presumably looks something like:

1. Invent and popularize new grammar games

2. ???

3. Profit!

I've heard people bring up this angle before once or twice, but I really don't see where the profit would come from for many of the things that catch on.

Do you have any sources for your theory? Has anyone dug into it enough to find these [adjective] masterminds?

Fair enough, though then you have to say that the Sophists artificially constructed their arguments, too. (Socrates was very against this.) And every sellout author since the origin of the printing press artificially constructed his or her books to appeal to the public. The news is artificially constructed– if it bleeds, it leads.

A lot of everything is "artificially constructed". The Beatles artificially constructed their songs.

Any sufficiently advanced "artificial construction" is indistinguishable from "organic construction".

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