How VERY ONLINE People Revolutionized The English Language

You: "Emoji are killing the English language." Me: "eMoJi ArE kIlLiNg ThE eNgLiSh LaNgUaGe" plus this specific screencap of SpongeBob Squarepants acting like a chicken.

If you understand the above text, this might be your favorite episode of The Cracked Podcast. If you don't understand that text, this WILL be your favorite episode of The Cracked Podcast, because everything you read online is about to make more sense.

On this week's show, Alex Schmidt is joined by linguist Gretchen McCulloch for a dig into her revelatory new book Because Internet: Understanding The New Rules Of Language. They'll explore how the past few decades contain several distinct generations of Internet users, each contributing to a worldwide linguistic sea-change. You'll discover which online generation you're a part of. You'll learn how 4 billion people work together to revolutionize our writing and speaking every day. And yes: you WILL discover why emoji are a valuable format that makes our writing richer.

Footnotes:

Because Internet: Understanding The New Rules Of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

The Lingthusiasm podcast

Video episode of Lingthusiasm about gestures

Gretchen McCulloch's work as Resident Linguist for WIRED

Gretchen McCulloch's work as Resident Linguist for The Toast

thread on impact of book pre-orders and library requests

Gretchen McCulloch Twitter thread on how different spoken languages could've impacted programming languages if they were more dominant

Mocking SpongeBob (Know Your Meme)

Viking Rune Symbols (DK Find Out)

Cuneiform examples (Michigan Technological University)

Keysmashing (All Things Linguistic)

Byte Magazine article about Usenet from 1983 (The Internet Archive)

1994 Today Show: "What is the Internet, Anyway?" (YouTube)

Mark Twain's "A Telephonic Conversation" (The Atlantic)

Newhart Phonecall (TV Tropes)

Emoji: The Complete History (Wired)

example of Cher using emoji on Twitter in an unusual way

example of Cher using emoji on Twitter more conventionally

Galaxy Brain Is the Meme That Dominated Discourse in 2017 (The Daily Dot)

In Praise of Emoticons :-) (Time Magazine)

Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as 'unreliable' source (The Guardian)

'Stories' was Instagram's smartest move yet (The Verge)

How TikTok Is Rewriting the World (The New York Times)

Exciting Tour News!

See our first-ever LIVE IN LONDON Cracked Podcast at The London Podcast Festival! The show is one night only, and that night is Sunday 8th September at Kings Place. Get your ticket right here!