E-Inklings

Saving this for later para purposes

You people are saints

might seem like a harmless quirk but once you start typing in exclusively lowercase you can never capitalize anything again outside the designated midsentence Gay Emphasis Zones or anyone following you for longer than a week will think you’re about to commit murder

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

This point is invalid unless you use an example in your sentence

I CAN SENTENCE HOW I WANT THANK

BEAUTIFUL

you see thats why i love english

I like to velociraptor around my house at 2 in the morning.

GOOD

My headache makes me want to clothesline into a wall

why do these make some semblance of sense 😨

Because brains don’t brain logically

Brains do brain logically! But when english doesn’t logic englishly, brain brains by itself to logic that english !

I hate that this makes sense

@suspendnodisbelief posts like this one remind me of your linguisticsing

Gratia tibi ago! (Literally “I do to you a thankfulness!” Turns out Latin lets you noun verbs, just as much as English lets you verb nouns.) Many languages have an extremely streamlined “verbnoun continuum,” with some languages, like Welsh, literally having several verbnoun forms used preferentially over “pure verbs.” Some English verbnouns have become so integral to typical modern language use that people even forget they were ever strictly JUST nouns, like “impact.” 

Like how Watergate gave us the “-gate” suffix for scandal.

@sidewaystime

This results from a set of processes known in linguistics as backformation, compounding, rebracketing, and clipping. These concepts are all related to each other and can happen at the same time. We can observe it in the word “cheeseburger,” derived from “hamburger.” “Burger” is taken to mean “a beef patty sandwiched between two buns, with or without other toppings and condiments,” when originally “hamburger” just meant “something or somebody from the city of Hamburg.” The backformed word is “burger,” which we then compound with “cheese” to get “cheeseburger.” Sometimes backformation doesn’t give us a whole word, just a morpheme - a reusable part of a word - like “-ception” or “-quel,” that mostly can’t stand on its own without another word attached to supply the overall meaning. With the word “inception,” the place where the word’s morphemes (parts) would normally be split apart from each other, is between “incep(t)” (to begin) and “-tion” (the act of whatever the first part says), like how “celebration” breaks across “celebra(te)” and “-tion.” It undergoes rebracketing, which is when the perceived break between the word’s parts happens in a different place than the actual place where those parts stick together. “Inception” gets rebracketed as “in” (inside) and “-ception,” which gets parsed as “nesting things recursively.” We clip “-ception” off its source word, no longer requiring the “in” to have a meaningful thing we can use, because “-ception” already automatically means something is going inside something else. Another example is “helicopter.” The actual original bracketing is between “helico-” (spinning) and “pter” (wing). It got rebracketed as “heli-” and “-copter,” with the second part being fused onto the ends of other morphemes to specify when a helicopter-like-thing is a different variety from usual, like “gyrocopter” and “Dogcopter.”

Memes have become so heavily context-dependent that they briefly spawned a side-phenomenon of corporations mistakenly assuming that the image combinations are simply random, and that “randomness” is what the new generation finds humorous, and then deliberately creating nonsense ads in a desperate attempt to appeal to the youth, which went on for several years before they finally started hiring younger social media managers.

Only valid addition

[Image descriptions: Three successive memes in two images. First, a Success Kid meme captioned “Memes in 2008″ and stating “Ate spaghetti while wearing a white shirt; didn’t get sauce on it.” Second, an Is This A Pigeon meme captioned “Memes in 2018″ and using other meme images for representing a snake asking if a boot is free real estate. Third, another Is This A Pigeon meme using images to represent a plate of spaghetti asking if a white shirt is free real estate. End image descriptions.]

very good content

Ah, some gold!

Omfg, a goldmine

@estheticallypleased

This is a blessing look at all of these templates

The number of images here is prohibitive for supplying individual image descriptions, but as an overall summary: this is an aggregated large number of blank meme image templates that users can fill with their own content.

Transcribed from discord have you ever thought about how much of our internet language would make absolutely zero sense to an outside observer things like our use of same/hard same, mood/big mood, gratuitious use of ™ to convey something very specific that we can’t quite label the internet has its own dialects of english with their own rules we even have these unspoken rules about punctuation if you ask someone how their day was and they say  “fine” then everything’s good but if they respond  “Fine.” something’s definitely wrong even though the latter would simply be considered proper grammar in formal english language is weird and all the ways we have to show e m p h a s i s on certain words that can all mean something but also can just be stacking levels of i̼͈̣n̜̦͚t͉̗͉e̛̼͎n̝s̵̻̦i̴t̠͈̟y̬̣͝ language is one of our oldest and most important tools to civilization and it’s still being actively worked on and developed into something more and i think that’s just crazy

okay so the other day, I messaged someone a question and they messaged back “Yes.” and I swear to god I got an icy chill of dread before I remembered that they’re older than me and not much of an internet person, and from them “Yes.” rather than “yeah” or “yep” is just good grammar and not, in fact, a Declaration of War

Everybody talking bout tumblr linguistics but I didn’t see many mentions of how we use tags as a mean to express thoughts or opinions with a lower volume? I’d really like an analysis of this like the ones there are about punctuation, if any language nerd would <3

This is known as code-switching, a term in linguistics that refers to changing the register (degree of formality) and lexicon (list of words and phrases you willingly use in context) to account for your setting, audience, familiarity with that audience, and other features of social appropriateness.  Additionally, the totality of all the ways you, personally, talk, in every context of your life, is called your idiolect. 

internet linguistics fascinate me. like the humble memers of tumblr have created this whole new dialect of english, we can add tone to what we write on the internet. like if something is Important we would capitalize the word, even in the middle of a sentence. sometimes we don’t even have punctuation like at all and the words just flow very nicely like this and you’re able to read it fast cuz the punctuation is gone. we know the difference between writing “yes” and “yes.” and the that “ok…”, “okay”, “ok”, and “k” all have different meanings. we all know that “DJIELAkwkdhEJ” means that the person writing it is very excited and full of emotion they don’t have words to describe. idk this isn’t a complete list obviously but guys we’ve created our own dialect of english. this has the potential to have a late impact on the english language as a whole in the future. and we all get to shape this experimental, flexible dialect on this goddamn website. I just love internet linguistics ok

We recommend looking through the blogs tumblinguistics and allthingslinguistic for material for your corpus. The former published a dissertation on Computer Media Communication, and the latter published a book on the language use of the Internet. Our blog has also aggregated a fair bit, though it’s still new compared to those linked above.