Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch Page 0,2

a feeling so intense that you can’t possibly type real words, has patterns. A typical keysmash might look like “asdljklgafdljk” or “asdfkfjas;dfI”—quite distinct from, say, a cat walking across the keyboard, which might look like “tfgggggggggggggggggggsxdzzzzzzzz.”* Here’s a few patterns we can observe in keysmash:

Almost always begins with “a”

Often begins with “asdf”

Other common subsequent characters are g, h, j, k, l, and ;, but less often in that order, and often alternating or repeating within this second group

Frequently occurring characters are the “home row” of keys that the fingers are on in rest position, suggesting that keysmashers are also touch typists

If any characters appear beyond the middle row, top-row characters (qwe . . .) are more common than bottom-row characters (zxc . . .)

Generally either all lowercase or all caps, and rarely contains numbers

Sure, a lot of these patterns relate to the fact that we’re mashing on the home row of the QWERTY keyboard rather than using random-letter generators, but they’re reinforced by our social expectations. I conducted an informal survey, asking if people retype their keysmash if it doesn’t look, er, smashing enough. While there were a few keysmash purists, who posted whatever came out, I found that the majority of people will delete and remash if they don’t like what it looks like, plus a significant minority who will adjust a few letters. I also heard from several people who use the Dvorak keyboard, where the home row begins with vowels rather than ASDF, who reported that they just don’t bother keysmashing anymore at all because their layout makes it socially illegible. Keysmashing may be shifting, though: I’ve noticed a second kind, which looks more like “gbghvjfbfghchc” than “asafjlskfjlskf,” from thumbs mashing against the middle of a smartphone keyboard.

It’s not just that we make patterns. It’s that even when we’re not trying to make patterns, when we think we’re just a billion monkeys mashing incoherently on a billion keyboards, we’re social monkeys—we can’t help but notice each other and respond to each other. Even when something looks incoherent to an outsider, even when it’s intended as incoherent for an insider, we as humans are still practically incapable of doing things without patterns. My mission with this book is to map out what some of those patterns are, to examine why they fall into the patterns that they do, and to give you the tools to look at internet language and other cutting-edge linguistic innovation through the lens of a pattern-seeker.

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As with any period of tremendous disruption, the explosion of informal writing is changing the way we communicate. The norms that we worked out for books and newspapers don’t work so well for texts and chats and posts. Imagine how weird you’d think ordinary conversation was if you’d only ever seen scripted TV monologues! We have a sense, more or less, of how informal speech works. We have a long history of doing it, and it’s the primary thing that linguistics studies, much as literature and rhetoric study formal writing and formal speaking. But the combination of writing and informality has been neglected—and this quadrant is precisely where internet writing excels. How does it fit in among these known quantities?

SPOKEN

WRITTEN

INFORMAL

conversations, talking to yourself

texts, chat, social media, diaries, notes

FORMAL

speeches, radio, television, acting

books, articles, static websites

One way to think about informal writing is through the lens of efficiency. Across languages, short words tend to be more common words, which contribute a small amount of information to a sentence, while longer words occur less frequently and contribute more information. Think about the English words “of” and “rhinoceros.” “Of” is clearly more common, and it’s also much shorter—a simple vowel + consonant sequence that can even be reduced into a single neutral vowel, as in “sorta” or “outta.” “Rhinoceros” is longer and way more informative: if you hear “rhinoceros!” out of the blue, you can form a pretty solid hypothesis about what’s going on, and if it’s accidentally omitted (“I am fond of this ______”), many other words could take its place. Hearing “of!” out of the blue is pretty much meaningless, and if it’s accidentally omitted (“I am fond __ this rhinoceros”), you can be almost certain that it was meant to be there. It would be a waste to use the short, versatile monosyllable “of” for the relatively