when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
ACTUALLY
This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.
Because itâs 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 theyâre 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 theyâre 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 Iâm 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.Â
Hereâs what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speechâthat is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate âthis speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.â 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 weâre 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 âlanguage.â 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.Â
Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you donât think thatâs cool as fuck then I donât even know what to tell you.
i love this post
This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so thatâs a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is whatâs happened just I think itâs a reasonable assumption there might be a connection
^this.
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 sentenceâŚ
and let your voice
trail away
look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg
language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesnât remain the same unless itâs 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 âtolâ and âsmolâ in relation to âtallâ and âsmallâ) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because thereâs 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
weâve 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 thatâs fucking awesome okay
awesome
I love this so much and language is so great and Iâve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk itâs so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language
I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:
What?
What.
what
