a lot of prescriptive linguists (the fancy term for snotty english majors, faux-talgic baby boomers, racist gatekeepers, and other subdivisions of the language police) like to shame The Youth for lazy capitalization and punctuation, but the interesting thing is that most young ppl i know who build their lives around texting are actually pretty damn deliberate about their language choices
“u” and “you” show degrees of closeness w/ your partner; using punctuation at the end of a reply text indicates tone; capitalizing certain words in the middle of the sentence is for Emphasis; sometimes we’re sloppy and sometimes we make mistakes but there is a real grammar to internet communication because by “grammar” i mean a “code of language rules that society agrees upon in order to create meaning”, and that is the opposite of being lazy
(tumblr absolutely has such a grammar and you can tell when someone’s not fluent)
the old guard is passionately defending a pure linguistic territory that we don’t want anymore, it’s not useful enough for 21st century relationships dependent on the subtleties of texts
#This actually quite true #like my Mum never understands why I’M OFTEN TALKING IN ALL CAPS WITH MY FRIENDS #and I can never properly explain why #because it means more than just yelling #it can be any range of things depending on the context and the person I’m talking with #we might be excited about something or trying emphasize something or just showing solidarity with one another #it’s incredible I can never quite explain it
keeping Izzy’s tags because they’re so true.