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You can't see it, but you can feel it

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It's also definitely not a stretch at all to say he'd probably met people who self-medicated with cocaine to deal with what we'd now call ADHD. Like, the second ever Sherlock Holmes story begins with Watson protesting Holmes' overuse of cocaine, and Holmes replying that he needs it to deal with his overactive brain -- it's entirely plausible that ACD had had that exact conversation with someone or multiple someones.

At a time when cocaine was regularly administered by other doctors, Doyle wrote Watson to have a clear aversion and dislike of the drug and understood that it was bad for you. It’s written as a clear indication that Sherlock, despite all his brilliance and genius, is still a human being who can make very bad decisions for himself.

Not only that, but Watson does ultimately win and gets Sherlock off of his addition to cocaine in the end. It takes him a while, but Sherlock is weened off the drug and this is seen as a good thing for everyone involved. In fact in a later story Watson comes home and sees a needle and fears that Sherlock might’ve had a relapse (he didn’t, the needle was just being used for something else involving a case).

He had a clear disdain for social convention while understanding deeply how to conform to it in order to survive; a lot of Holmes' deductions actually depend on assumptions about typical human behavior in a given situation rather than physical evidence alone. It's the kind of encyclopedic conscious knowledge of unwritten social rules you might develop in order to mask successfully.

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. 

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

What?

What.