Jolly

Story time:

While taking put the trash at work, I kicked this little bag of pennies. Obviously, since I’m poor, a grabbed them and threw them in my pocket before going on with the rest of my shift.

Close to the end of my shift, I remembered this bag of pennies, so I took it out and counted it out. 7 cents.

My coworker came up and started talking to me while I was doing this, so we chatted, the entire time, this tiny bag of pennies in my hand.

Meanwhile, one of my managers sees me and my coworker talking over this bag, immediately thinks that it’s drugs, yells, and grabs both of us and drags us to the back room.

So, we’re sitting there, me clutching this bag of pennies in my fist, while my manager gets my GM on the phone, yelling about how we were “trading drugs during our shift” and “endangering ourselves and others in the workplace.”

Within 10 minutes, my GM was there, papers in hand to terminate our employment, talking about how they should call the cops. I started crying, cause they wouldn’t let me get a word in edge-wise, my coworker was actually texting his dad the entire time, trying to get them to come fight for him.

It wasn’t until the GM asked what drugs they were that they finally let me talk.

So, while I was sobbing, I opened my hand and dropped the bag in my manager’s hand.

And he bursts out laughing.

Within seconds I had explained everything, the pennies, the situation, everything.

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

“but i dont have any money”

“so what do you have to offer”

he was crying

until he realized he was taking selfies on my laptop