Jackson: That period you just put at the end of your text message? It doesn't mean you're being grammatically correct. It means you're being a jerk. Olivia: (Laughs) It sounds harsh, but you’re not wrong. And today, we're going to prove it. Jackson: This is one of those things I feel in my bones but could never explain. It’s like there’s this whole secret rulebook for talking online that no one ever gave us. Olivia: Well, someone finally wrote it down. That's the kind of wild, hidden rule of language we're diving into today, all from Gretchen McCulloch's fantastic book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Jackson: And McCulloch is the perfect guide for this. She's not just some academic in an ivory tower; she was the resident linguist at WIRED and co-hosts the Lingthusiasm podcast. She's deep in the trenches of internet culture, which is probably why the book became a New York Times bestseller and was named a best book of the year by a ton of outlets. Olivia: Exactly. She argues that the internet didn't break language. It supercharged it. And it all started with a new kind of writing that barely existed 30 years ago. Before the internet, when did people, you know, just write informally to each other? Jackson: I guess... letters? Postcards? But even those felt a bit formal. You’d think about what you were writing. You wouldn't just dash off a note saying 'k.' Olivia: Precisely. For most of human history, writing was a huge effort. It was a specialist’s job. McCulloch brings up this amazing story about Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, back in the year 800. This guy ruled a massive empire, but he couldn't even sign his own name. He had scribes for that. Jackson: Wow. So writing was like coding is today—a specific, technical skill not everyone had. Olivia: A perfect analogy. Writing was for books, for official documents. It was formal, permanent, and edited. Then, the internet happened. Suddenly, we all had keyboards, and we were writing all the time—texts, chats, social media posts. And this new writing wasn't formal at all. It was quick, conversational, and completely unedited. It was informal writing, on a massive scale.

Jackson: Okay, but is texting and tweeting really 'writing' in the same way? It feels so... messy. It’s full of typos and slang and just… noise. Olivia: That's what makes it so fascinating to linguists! For centuries, they could only study the "finished product" of formal writing. Speech was too ephemeral to capture easily. But internet writing is the best of both worlds: it’s spontaneous and conversational like speech, but it’s also written down, creating a massive, searchable archive of how real people communicate. Jackson: So all my embarrassing AIM messages from 2004 are now linguistic data? Great. Olivia: (Laughs) Potentially! But it’s in that messiness that we see the rules emerge. McCulloch has this perfect, mind-blowing example: the keysmash. Jackson: You mean like when you’re so overwhelmed you just mash the keyboard and get something like 'asdfghjkl;'? Olivia: Exactly that. You'd think it's pure, random chaos. But it's not. McCulloch ran an informal survey and found that people have very strong opinions about what a "good" keysmash looks like. If it has too many vowels, or if it accidentally spells a real word, people will often delete it and re-smash the keyboard. Jackson: You're kidding. People re-type their keyboard smashes? That's insane and brilliant. Olivia: It is! Some people even edit them, taking out a letter here or there to make it look more "smashing." What this proves is that even in what we think is a completely random act, our human brains are imposing patterns. We’re following unwritten rules. As McCulloch puts it, we're "social monkeys—we can’t help but notice each other and respond to each other," even when we're just mashing keys. We’re building language, even out of noise. Jackson: That’s incredible. It’s like finding a hidden grammar in something that’s supposed to be the opposite of grammar. It completely reframes what's happening when we're online. Olivia: It does. We're not just passively using language; we're actively building it, together, all the time. And who is doing the building is just as interesting.

Jackson: Okay, so if we're all following these hidden rules, why do I text so differently from my parents? It's like we're speaking different dialects. Their emoji usage is... a choice. Olivia: That's because you probably belong to different internet tribes. This is one of the book's most powerful ideas. McCulloch categorizes people into different waves of internet adoption, and each wave has its own "digital accent." Jackson: Like a founder effect? Where the first settlers of a place determine how everyone talks later on? Olivia: Exactly like that! She identifies a few key groups. First, you have the Old Internet People. They came online before the mid-90s, using things like Usenet and dial-up BBSes. They were tech-savvy and built the foundational culture of online communication. Jackson: The pioneers. Got it. Olivia: Then came the Full Internet People, who came online in their youth, around the late 90s and early 2000s. They grew up with AIM, MySpace, and Geocities. For them, the internet was primarily a social space to hang out with friends they already knew. Jackson: That’s me. My entire teenage social life happened in AIM away messages. Olivia: Then you have the Semi Internet People. They came online a bit later, maybe for work or because everyone else was. They use Facebook to keep up with family, but they’re not as immersed in the culture. They see the internet as a tool more than a place. And finally, you have the Post Internet People, who’ve never known a world without social media, and the Pre Internet People, who came to it very late in life. Jackson: This framework is so useful. Can you give me a concrete example of how these tribes talk differently? Olivia: The perfect one is the word "lol." For Old and Full Internet People, "lol" is a subtle, versatile particle. It can signal irony, soften a statement, or just act as a conversational lubricant. It's rarely about actual laughter. But for many Semi Internet People, "LOL" in all caps means what it literally says: "Laughing Out Loud." They use it when they are genuinely amused. Jackson: Oh, that explains everything! My mom uses 'LOL' like she's genuinely laughing out loud, while for me, 'lol.' with a period is the most sarcastic thing I can possibly type. Olivia: And you just hit on the next layer. The Post Internet People, the youngest generation, have mostly abandoned "lol" for laughter, but they’ve honed its use for irony and passive aggression. Each tribe has its own subtle grammar. Jackson: This is a great way to understand people, but some critics say McCulloch's view is a bit too rosy. She doesn't really touch on how platforms like Facebook are monetizing this very language, turning our informal chats into data for advertisers. The tribes exist, but they exist in a corporate playground. Olivia: That's a very fair and important critique. The book focuses more on the descriptive linguistics—the "what is happening"—rather than the political economy of the platforms. It celebrates the user's creativity but spends less time on the systems that constrain and exploit that creativity. It’s a valid point that adds a necessary layer of complexity to her argument. And that complexity is most visible in how we've learned to express tone.

Olivia: That difference in 'lol' is a perfect example of our final topic: the invention of a new kind of body language for the internet. When we lost face-to-face cues, we didn't just give up on expressing emotion. We invented new ways to do it with the tools we had: the characters on our keyboard. Jackson: Which brings us back to the passive-aggressive period. How did that happen? A period is just a period! Olivia: In formal writing, yes. But informal writing is different. A study by linguist Tyler Schnoebelen analyzed over 150,000 text messages and found that periods are incredibly rare in short, casual texts. We don't need them. The message break itself signals the end of a thought. So when you deliberately add a period to a short message like "okay." or "sounds good.", you're adding something extra. You're adding a tone of finality, of seriousness. Jackson: A tone that feels cold or annoyed in a casual chat. It's like someone answering you in a monotone. Olivia: Exactly. It's a typographical tone of voice. And we've developed a whole symphony of them. Think about the sarcasm tilde, like "I'm so excited for this meeting~". It mimics that sing-song, sarcastic tone of voice. Or expressive lengthening, like "soooooo good." Jackson: And of course, the most famous one: ALL CAPS MEANS YOU'RE SHOUTING. Olivia: The original typographical tone of voice! And it's not even new. McCulloch traces it back to a newspaper from 1856 describing a character "shouting in capital letters." We've been trying to put our bodies back into our writing for a long time. Jackson: So it's not just punctuation, right? Emoji are a huge part of this. They feel like the most direct way to put emotion back into text. Olivia: They are! And they also have a fantastic origin story. Back in 1982, on a computer science message board at Carnegie Mellon, a discussion about physics in a free-falling elevator got out of hand when a joke was mistaken for a real safety warning. Jackson: Of course it was an elevator physics joke. Nerds. Olivia: (Laughs) A professor named Scott Fahlman got fed up with the confusion and proposed a solution. He wrote, "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." And just like that, the first emoticon was born. It wasn't about decoration; it was about clarifying intention to prevent misunderstanding. Jackson: That’s amazing. It came from a practical need to say, "Hey, I'm not being serious right now!" Which is basically what half of all emoji are used for today. Olivia: Precisely. From that simple smiley, we got kaomoji in Japan, and eventually the full emoji set we have today. They aren't just little pictures; they are gestures. They're the digital equivalent of a nod, a wink, or a thumbs-up. They're how we show we're human.

Jackson: So what's the big takeaway here? After all this, is the internet ruining language or saving it? Olivia: I think McCulloch’s answer is a firm "neither." The core message of the book is that our metaphor for language has been wrong. We tend to think of language as a pristine book, stored in a dictionary, that must be protected from change. Jackson: Right, the "rules" we all learned in school. Olivia: But that's not what language is. A better metaphor, which the internet makes beautifully clear, is that language is a network. It’s a living, breathing system that is constantly being built and rebuilt by the people who use it. It's decentralized, collaborative, and always evolving. The internet didn't break language; it just made that messy, beautiful, human process visible to everyone for the first time. Jackson: So all this informal writing isn't a sign of decay, it's a sign of life. Olivia: Exactly. It's the most human thing in the world. As McCulloch says, "The internet has become real life." We can't separate our online selves from our offline selves anymore, and the language we use reflects that. It's a language built for connection, for community, for being human together. Jackson: It makes you wonder, what linguistic rules are we all creating right now without even realizing it? Olivia: That's a great question. And it’s one we’d love to hear your thoughts on. What's a weird internet language rule you follow? A specific emoji you use, or a way you type that has a hidden meaning only your friends get? Let us know on our socials. We're genuinely curious to see what you're all building out there. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.