Editorial: “Txtpsk is a stimulating force in language evolution“
THE past few decades have seen a democratisation of written language unprecedented in human history, driven by digital media. Thanks to more than 2 billion internet-linked computers and 6 billion cellphones in the world, we are all both authors and audiences – our daily discourse playing out via millions of words typed onto their screens.
For some, this is a process where “more” inexorably means “worse”: into a shadow of former glories. Yet this misses much of the point. For alongside their loosening and cheapening of words, our young tools have combined the instant and the infinitely reproducible – and are steadily blurring the bounds between private utterance and public performance. It is a context within which even the most laughable-seeming simplicities conceal possibilities that demand our attention.
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Consider the complexities lurking behind just six letters, in the form of two iconic contemporary initialisms: OMG (oh my God!) and LOL (laughing out loud). in March 2011 – but boast considerably longer pedigrees. OMG, for example, dates back to a 1917 letter from Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher to Winston Churchill, in which the former exclaimed: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) – Shower it on the Admiralty!”
LOL, used to express amusement, is a rather younger coinage, dating to the pre-web bulletin board systems of the early 1980s. It is also, though, a more intriguing one, representing one of the earliest examples of a very particular trend of digital communications: self-dramatisation.
As , the phrase “laughing out loud” is far from a straightforward description. Someone who types “LOL” or “lol” (the difference between upper and lower case signalling variations in intensity and formality) is rarely, if ever, literally laughing out loud. Rather, they are framing their words within a kind of stage direction: a present-tense commentary designed to communicate the conversational emotions that writing – outside the most elaborately crafted literary examples – cannot usually convey in the absence of a human voice and face.
It is a simple innovation that reflects a central contemporary fact. Typing onto screens is becoming a dominant driving force behind the evolution of language, and this has brought vast ingenuity to bear on turning typed language into a medium as efficiently dynamic as spoken language itself.
“Typing onto screens is becoming a dominant force in the evolution of language”
The force of this change is perhaps most evident in the fact that LOL has travelled in the opposite direction to normal language change, migrating not from spoken words to type, but from typing into speech. Usually pronounced to rhyme with “doll”, it features with increasing regularity in the talk of so-called “digital natives” – a normalisation echoing the older habit taught by web addresses of speaking punctuation out loud (“dot com” having long become a standard expression).
LOL is only the tip of this particular iceberg, of course, and its success in imparting emotional shading to rapidly typed exchanges has bred a remarkable proliferation of variations. To type “ROFL” (rolling on the floor laughing) is, for example, to go one step beyond mere LOL-ing in both intensity and self-awareness; while to type “ROFLMAO” (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off) projects a state perhaps best described as highly amused irony.
Beyond these lie many hundreds of increasingly baroque versions, targeting particular groups, services, ideas and idiolects – and extending deep into the cultural mainstream. One of the best-selling dance music bands of recent years is called LMFAO (slightly too profane to spell out in full here). In a still more typing-centric move, there’s even a British indie band whose name, Δ, is pronounced “Alt-J” courtesy of a shortcut on the Apple keyboard used to produce the symbol for their name.
Pointlessly self-delighting as all this may appear, it shows a frantic evolutionary process in action. And it also points towards a central paradox of digital language: that, because it is the briefest and most easily typed terms that are used most often, it is within just a handful of letters and characters that the most sophisticated layers of new meaning are gathering.
This is a minimalism with roots in one of the most unexpectedly versatile technologies of the modern era: the text message. Originally built into cellphone networks as a testing facility for network operators, its initial success caught almost everyone by surprise – other than those young people who found in these precisely controlled few characters a perfectly minimal mode of interaction for an era of information overload.
Here, even one letter can carry an amazing burden of significance. On the more mischievous side of digital innovation, for example, there are those who follow an online philosophy of acting “for the lulz”. Note the lower case letters and deliberate use of the “internet z” – a common typing error when typing the letter “s” fast that has, thanks to the primacy of the keyboard, become a way of subtly shifting meaning.
Together, the “z” ending and deliberate misspelling of “lol” as “lul” denote a subversive strand in online culture. As embodied in the name of the notorious hackers’ collective, LulzSec (standing for “Lulz Security” and boasting the motto “the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense”), to do things “for the lulz” is to act in a spirit of anarchistic-bordering-on-nihilistic delight.
Language shifts like “lulz” represent what is technically known as ““: that is, a linguistic effect aimed at the eye rather than at the ear. It is a process that both increases the emotional nuances of communication and introduces a further layer of remove between words and meanings – something that, like so many things online, only yields its full sense if everyone involved knows the conventions being used.
All of which brings us back to the notion of performance, and its central importance in online language. Ultimately, to type that I am “laughing out loud” is to signal my and my interlocutor’s membership of a certain tribe. It is as much about acknowledging someone else’s wit – or attempted wit – as signalling my own amusement. And it couches the entire exchange in a protective carapace of self-reference, ripe for augmentation and subversion.
Simplicity, here, sits above a complex arena of performance and layered perceptions – not the least of whose mysteries is the gulf between seemingly spontaneous words and the remote, anonymous business of typing them at a keyboard. Even if the “me” I vividly represent on screen resembles my true self – “I” remain an elaborate exercise in self-invention, conjured out of a performance crafted letter by letter.
Little wonder that some and status updates to their most eloquent friends, or spend many hours selecting 140 characters perfectly pitched to sound spontaneous. No matter what the doomsayers may argue, we live in an age where mere handfuls of type mask the greatest verbal challenges of all.
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is an author and columnist for BBC Future who focuses on digital culture. He has a PhD in contemporary British literature from the University of Oxford. His latest book is
