“Like how money is just squiggles on paper or on a screen until it determines whether you can eat lunch, words are just meat twitches until they determine whether you can get a job — or whether someone will even deign to tell you where the shoe section is.”
Language is arbitrary sound (or symbol) — physically meaningless — until social consensus assigns it power. “Standard” forms of language are not intrinsically clearer or more logical; they are socially dominant, which translates into real-world gate-keeping. The same information delivered in a stigmatized dialect is treated differently.
Columbusing language
“it’s tempting to mislabel the many words currently being appropriated into general American pop culture from African American English as ‘social media words’ simply because they’re used by young people… Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community.”
Internet slang is frequently AAVE. Crediting the internet (or white youth culture) for linguistic innovation that originated in Black communities is a form of erasure. The mechanism is the same as Columbus “discovering” land that millions already inhabited. See in-group-out-group: whose contribution gets counted is a social and political question, not a linguistic one.
Books as maps, not embalming
“Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity… we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language’s living, moving splendor. Every atlas eventually becomes a history book, but a globe is still a glorious thing to feel spinning under your hands with potential.”
The anxiety about internet language “destroying” writing mistakes the map for the territory. Prescriptive rules document language at a moment in time. The living language keeps moving. This is not loss; it is how language has always worked.