Home > Author > Gretchen McCulloch
1 " We've had the right to adapt longer than we've had the right to prevent copying. "
― Gretchen McCulloch , Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
2 " Thinking of emoji as gestures helps put things into perspective if we're tempted to start thinking, "If words were good enough for Shakespeare, why aren't they good enough for us?" We can pause and realize that plain words weren't actually good enough for Shakespeare. A lot of what Shakespeare wrote was plays, designed not to be read on a page, but to be performed by people. How many of us have struggled through reading Shakespeare as a disembodied script in school, only to see him come to life in a well-acted production? "
3 " ...despite the fact that it's technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an eaiser time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers. "
4 " ...despite the fact that it's technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an easier time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers. "
― Gretchen McCulloch
5 " The phone was as revolutionary for conversation as the internet was: before the phone, you either had conversations that were spoken and in real time with people right next to you, or written and far away and very slow. "
6 " The difference between how people communicate in the internet era boils down to a fundamental question of attitude: Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline one? "
7 " Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project. "
8 " Dictionaries are the record of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using. "
9 " Sending someone all of the possible birthday party emoji is extra festive: great! But sending someone all of the possible phallic emoji (say, the eggplant and the cucumber and the corncob and the banana) is NOT extra sexxaayy: that’s a weird salad. "
10 " The true emoji question is what billions of people are currently doing with emoji, not what an advertiser or a philosopher thinks they could hypothetically do with them. "
11 " Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity's most spectacular open source project. "
12 " IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them. "
13 " Irony is a linguistic trust fall. "
14 " Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change. "
15 " Still, it’s tempting to mislabel the many words currently being appropriated into general American pop culture from African American English as “social media words” simply because they’re used by young people, and young people are on social media, without giving due credit to the words’ true origins. Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering America despite the millions of people who already lived there. "
16 " Like how money is just squiggles on paper or on a screen until it determines whether you can eat lunch, words are just meat twitches until they determine whether you can get a job -- or whether someone will even deign to tell you where the shoe section is. "
17 " language is a thing that lives in the minds of individual humans at individual points in time, a thing that can’t be fully encompassed in a static list of rules like a game of chess. "
18 " High school is a place where people really notice small social details, whether that’s the cool brand of jeans, who’s now going out with who, or vowels. "
19 " adding someone in social media is a way of ading them to the hallway you stroll down, a way of saying, "I might like to have more unplanned interactions with you, and we can see where things go from there. "
20 " Perfectly following a list of punctuation rules may grant me some kinds of power, but it won’t grant me love. Love doesn’t come from a list of rules—it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other. When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love. But for all the subtle vocal modulations that typography can express, we’re not just voices. We still need a way to convey the messages that we send with the rest of our bodies. "
