Shippyster!

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

Not to mention?? The lexicon and grammatical particulars of online communication are freaking fascinating. There are different dialects and referential imagery that is so steeped in layers of meme evolution that you can literally see a picture of Obama’s eyes kind of half-hooded and know exactly what you’re supposed to feel and it’s so freaking cool because these forms of communication, they aren’t just “zomg random,” they actually do follow rules and have structural foundations that we’ve all somehow internalized, and we use them as a way of relating to one another in a text-based medium that could be, SHOULD be, incredibly stifling but it’s not, because we made it our own. We created new ways of speaking, of communicating with one another clearly even when we can’t see faces or read tone or body language, so that I can say to someone “I did a cool thing!!” online and be talking about the exact same thing I’m also referencing in that corporate email where I say “the objective was successfully completed” but those do not sound the same at all because they aren’t the same at all. One conveys my excitement, my pride, my happiness at achieving whatever goal I achieved, while the other is a polite, professional-sounding report to a superior, and the fact that they were both conveying the same idea in 5 words but in such different ways is freaking awesome, so frankly fuck you if you think I’m somehow ‘childish’ for enjoying that.