So I often think about linguistics as something that’s spoken. And you’re telling us all about the things that we do every day, but don’t even realize we’re doing them. I’m here with Gretchen McCulloch, an internet linguist. So I’m Molly Webster, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And that was actually the first time that a literary agent contacted me for writing that article, and so the timing worked out really well. So I was feeling like there was more there. There’s this level of double meaning that we use now that you didn’t see in the early days of the internet, and that it seems like the time is right to try to expand on that again. I was comparing doge with the earlier generation of your classic lol cat memes and thinking, there’s an additional layer of irony in internet writing now.

And I got to the second-last paragraph of the doge meme article, and I found myself thinking, huh. That was the one with the Shiba Inu a few years ago. I miss The Toast still.Īnd I wrote an article for them, analyzing the linguistics of the doge meme. GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: The genesis for thinking, OK, there’s actually maybe a book here, or there’s some sort of longer thing here, came from an article that I wrote for the now sadly departed website, The Toast back in 2014. And so, I mean, what made you focus on the internet? You were obviously noticing something there. And when I see stuff going on online, I just want to analyze it. And so I spend a lot of time on the internet, as many of us do. GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I’m just kind of that type of person. So if you go out with me to a pub or something, and you say something, I might pause you and say, wait a second. GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I find, as a linguist, I have a hard time turning that linguist part of my brain off. What made you think, oh, I can analyze this? We can dig in here about what’s happening with language because of the internet. I mean, I think it’s one thing to observe a thing.

MOLLY WEBSTER: I feel like so many people reading this book would think that. I felt like when I was reading this book, that you had been listening in on my day-to-day conversations with people, and then were like, OK, let me analyze this for you, Molly. She co-hosts the podcast Lingthusiasm, and she’s the author of the new book, Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. So Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist. And you know what emoji to drop into a message to convey your meaning. You understand the ins and outs of Snapchat. Or maybe you’re just a person who has grown up online. You discovered that might have been a bad thing unless you really were shouting. And then you gradually have to pick up the lingo. I think I signed online for AOL Instant Messenger. So when did you first get online? Was it way back in the early days of the computer bulletin board or during AOL? MOLLY WEBSTER: For the rest of the hour, how online communication has been changing the way we write informally.

Rolling tumbleweed gif meme