#internet language

Hi there! You wouldn't happen to have any record of neopronouns being used in online circles (like forums) in the late 90's and early 2000's, would you? I've heard that some neopronouns, like "ze" / "hir" and "xe" / "xem", were used in some online circles around that time. I'd love to have some sources to include in a mega-post I'm making about neopronouns. If you can help me out in any way, I'd be eternally grateful! :)

Gretchen: I did a study with a smartphone keyboard app looking at millions of anonymised examples of how real people use emoji in aggregate. One of the things that we came across really early on in this data – so I got them to extract examples of the most common sequences of two, three, and four emoji, because this is a common thing that people do for a large data set of words is they’ll say one of the most common sequences of two, three, and four words. So, let’s try to do the same thing with emoji and see what happens because, obviously, we couldn’t read individual people’s messages. This is a way of kind of extracting from that and figuring out what the common sequences are. The most common sequence of emoji overall is [tears of joy] [tears of joy]. Lauren: Right. Okay. Gretchen: The second most common sequence is [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy]. Lauren: Okay. Hmm… Gretchen: Do you wanna guess what the third most common sequence is? Lauren: I’m going for, hmm, [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy]? Gretchen: Yeah. Four of them. Lauren: Amazing. Gretchen: Once you get to number four, I think it was two kiss faces. So, it did change eventually. We did eventually run out of [tears of joy]. Lauren: Just moved on to more repeating sequences. Gretchen: Turned out, we looked at the Top 200 sequences of two, and then Top 200 of three, and Top 200 of four, and about half of all of these lists was just straight up repetition of the exact same emoji. This was really interesting to us because a lot of the emoji narratives and media at that point were really excited about the idea of telling stories with emoji of like, “Okay, if you have a [person] and then a [tongue sticking out] and then a [hamburger], maybe that means a person is eating a hamburger,” or something like that. But that’s not what people were doing. People were doing the exact same emoji a whole bunch of times in a row.

Why the fuck are people using the word ‘unalive’ here? This isn’t tiktok, you can use the word dead! You won’t get your post removed or whatever for using the word dead!

Perfectly following a list of punctuation rules may grant me some kinds of power, but it won't grant me love. Love doesn't come from a list of rules - it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other. When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting out intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love.