Here’s me doing something silly.

I’m going to talk about English. Language evolution. Grammar. Cultural use and meaning. I cannot even talk right. Let alone spell. But me is stupid brave. So here goes.

Language is one of the things defining a group. When you talk the way others talk – you feel part of. But it goes the other way round as well. Groups create languages. Parting themselves from others, BRANDing themselves. It’s a chicken-egg kind of thing (“Which came first”) – Creation of the language by the group or the definition of the group by the existence of a language.

Enough bitting around the bush. Let’s dive into some modern web-world examples:

1. Chat/IM/SMS. Written language is very different from spoken one. It’s more difficult to convey what you really feel or think when you write, without using “so many words” (See: Louis-Ferdinand Céline/”Journey to the End of the Night“ , pages 1 through 700). So what do you do when you have a flowing conversation platform (I say something, you answer) using only text? You change the language. You make up short abbreviations of feeling-describing phrases, and Vuala! – you’ve got emotions.
   Oh, add flow of conversation (aka – typing speed) and space limitations and you get something my dad will surely use. Not. Examples?
   • lol – Laughing out loud (that one will star later on). BTW, note the use of non-capitalized fonts. Though we’re dealing with abbreviations. The reason is simple (and are two) – it takes more effort to capitalize (another key – Shift. Let alone mobile phone keys….), hence slower, and capitalization is saved for “shouting” what is said. Put more emotion into it.
   • rofl – Rolling On Floor Laughing.
   • lmao – Laughing My Ass Off.
   • omg – Oh my God!
   • wtf – What The Fuck?

   And so on. Not part of the group? You’re not welcome (and cannot take part) in these conversations:

   “OMG WTF! u nevaz did dat, like, dats like, fkin gay! if i did dat id be like, wowz!!!!” (Actual AOL chat quote)

   and:

   nerd#1: pudding
   nerd#2: lmfao!
   nerd#1: we know ur ass is fat dude… just say lmao… or nothing at all…
   nerd#2: Lmfao! oh wait nvm…

   Not to mention Emoticons

2. l33t. Pretty much the same actually. Only here another group – programmers not wanting to be tapped and gamers (more of the same, actually) – replaced vowels with numbers and other ASCII characters.
   
   Some “l33t” loser “OMGZ0rz WTF n00b u d0n7 5|*34k l33t!!1 u r n0t 4 h4><0rz!!!”

   See this Wiki for more.

3. LOL cats. Not exactly a group-language since as far as I know there’s no group using it as means of conversation, but it’s a cultural phenomena non the less. Called “Kitty Pidgin” or “lolspeak” the language is built on broken grammar, spelling mistakes and made-up words but has sentence building logic and, well, spelling and grammar. It’s most common place of use is as caption to cute images of cats (“kittehs”). You probably got one of those “funny” chain mails from your cousin (just before you added her to the junk sending list):
4. To put the phenomena into perspective, icanhasheezburger, the big player in the “industry” (a-la Compete) gets nearly 500,000 visitors/months (US only). All looking at cats, ye? Care to compare it to Twitter? You’ll find coverage and a great Wiki on the subject and for us closer to Ceiling Cat, you can also find the Bible. Translated.
5. Twitter Talk. This one is new. I would have said it’s an evolution of the above, IM/Text-like communication, but Twitter is not intended to be an online communication tool. It’s broadcasting (I think). And yet, you’ll find many pages looking like this:Sunshine clear to me.

What’s the bottom line? Two actually. Points for us internet “experts” to remember:

1. Hope to create a community around a product/site? Make them talk the talk. If we manage to create a language – they will stay. Feel part of. Belonging. Humans, I tell ya.
2. We have to remember that where we feel at home not necessarily means our users do. Few examples:
   • How many people really understood what the “beta” residing for years next to the Google logo meant? How many cared?
   • You think this (from here) feedback system is funny? Cute? Useful? For all?
   • Is inline smartypants blog editing understood by everyone? Do we care?

<3 you all. Peace.

This post is tagged Culture, LOLCats, New English