McCulloch: Because Internet
Summary: A linguist’s analysis of how the internet has changed written language — not degraded it, but expanded it — creating new registers, new paralinguistic tools (emoji, punctuation as tone), and new cohort-based variation.
Sources: Clippings/McCulloch-Because-Internet.md
Source pages: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language — Quotes
Quote pages: Q01, Q02, Q03, Q04, Q05, Q06, Q07, Q08, Q09, Q10, Q11, Q12, Q13, Q14, Q15, Q16, Q17, Q18, Q19, Q20
Last updated: 2026-05-07
Language as open source project
“Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.”
The founding metaphor: language is not top-down (handed down by authorities, enforced by grammarians) but bottom-up (built by everyone who uses it, constantly forked and merged). Dictionaries, grammar books, and style guides are documentation, not specification.
Dictionaries: record, not rules
“Dictionaries are the record of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using.”
The prescriptivist/descriptivist divide. A dictionary that listed only “correct” usages would be failing at its actual function. Languages are not chess (a defined rule system) — they live and mutate in millions of minds simultaneously. See language-testing-and-identity: standardized tests likewise claim to measure language while actually constructing a particular valued variety of it.
Language lives in minds, not rule lists
“language is a thing that lives in the minds of individual humans at individual points in time, a thing that can’t be fully encompassed in a static list of rules like a game of chess.”
No authoritative list can capture a living language, because language is not a list — it is a distributed practice. Every speaker carries an internalized grammar that partly overlaps and partly diverges from every other speaker’s. Variation is not failure; it is the substrate on which change operates.
Emoji as gesture: filling the paralinguistic gap
“Thinking of emoji as gestures helps put things into perspective if we’re tempted to start thinking, ‘If words were good enough for Shakespeare, why aren’t they good enough for us?’ We can pause and realize that plain words weren’t actually good enough for Shakespeare. A lot of what Shakespeare wrote was plays, designed not to be read on a page, but to be performed by people.”
Writing has always lost something relative to speech: tone of voice, facial expression, gesture. Informal internet writing — emoji, capitalization for emphasis, ellipsis for trailing off — is not a degradation but a recovery. We invented new paralinguistic tools because we needed them, just as spoken language uses body language.
The quantity rule for emoji: adding more of one type increases intensity (birthday emoji → more festive). But sending “all the phallic emoji” is NOT more seductive — “that’s a weird salad.” Context and type matter, not just quantity.
Writing for love, not power
“Perfectly following a list of punctuation rules may grant me some kinds of power, but it won’t grant me love… 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 our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love.”
Two functions of writing: rule-following as power performance (demonstrating education, class, correctness), and informal writing as relationship building (conveying warmth, casualness, connection). Internet writing has massively expanded the second function. Neither is inherently superior.