First we LOLed. Now we’re changing the way a sentence works

I talked to Clive Thompson for The Message about (nominalized) subordinate clauses and the rise of internet syntax. It was hard to pick just one part to excerpt though -- you should probably just go read the whole thing here, which has lots more examples and also features commentary from Ben Zimmer. 

Grammatically speaking, what’s going on here is the rise of the “subordinate clause.” A subordinate clause isn’t a sentence on its own. As the name implies, it requires another sentence fragment to complete it, as with this example that McCulloch and I looked at on Yik Yak:

Usually you can quickly deduce what the missing part would be. Maybe it’s something like You, sadly, always know what to do when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” Or maybe the full sentence that emerges in your head is more convoluted, like Nothing is more bittersweet than reflecting on the challenges of dating someone who is superficially attractive but owns a pomeranian and thus, you worry, has all sorts of dog/partner priority issues, which you can instantly intuit when you’re using a dating app and see someone when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” The point is, it’s up to you imagine the rest of the utterance. It’s like the author is handing you a little puzzle. Subordinate-clause tweets and Yik-Yak postings seduce us into filling out that missing info, McCulloch says. “Our brain has to work a little bit harder to figure out what it’s referring to, and so making that connection is very satisfying. It’s like getting a joke. You have to draw that connection for yourself a little bit — but because you can do it, it works really well.” A historic parallel? The crazy, long chapter headings in 19th-century novels, which often were also dependent clauses, inviting the reader to imagine the rest of the baroque narrative. “In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Stranger,” McCulloch jokes. “The ‘in which’ is doing a very similar thing.” (Read the rest.)

Something that's also occurred to me since the interview is the relationship between (nominalized) subordinate clauses and the gif-captioning tumblrs that were popular around 2012, like whatshouldwecallme and its themed variations. A classic early post, for example, has the subordinate clause caption "When my best friend and I decide we're not going out" and the reaction gif of a really pleased-looking kid saying "I've got on my eating pants". But at some point between then and now, the subordinate-clause-style caption and the reaction gif or image split ways.