The Totes Amazesh Way Millennials Are Changing the English Language(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
The Totes Amazesh Way Millennials Are Changing the English Language
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/the-totes-amazesh-way-millennials-are-changing-the-english-language/
22 comments
> It's mostly done sarcastically, though when you do it all the time, is it really sarcastic?
Anecdotally, it seems that this is how a lot of new phrasing is spread. It starts off funny, then ironically as an inside joke, then it's just wrote.
My little sister started tapping her index and middle fingers together to make a hash symbol while saying "hashtag [whatever]". Started out as a joke, making a bit of fun of some tv show or something and at the same time pointing out that she "got" the reference... and before she knew it it was second nature.
Anecdotally, it seems that this is how a lot of new phrasing is spread. It starts off funny, then ironically as an inside joke, then it's just wrote.
My little sister started tapping her index and middle fingers together to make a hash symbol while saying "hashtag [whatever]". Started out as a joke, making a bit of fun of some tv show or something and at the same time pointing out that she "got" the reference... and before she knew it it was second nature.
Good observation. I remember 'lol' becoming popular and it was mainly used ironically. Now it's normal and I only vaguely notice when people much older than myself use it.
>is it really sarcastic?
obvs
obvs
totes ma goats.
Dude, that's so hip. All those people grooving to the new vibe.
I think it's worth noting that different socioeconomic classes have developed their own vernacular, and thus, it's slightly foggy of the Post to not comment on the population surveyed.
For the more academically minded among us who have time in their day to watch, here's the academic talk given on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cJoiGQ7yj0 - I don't have time to watch it now, but totes will later.
I think it's worth noting that different socioeconomic classes have developed their own vernacular, and thus, it's slightly foggy of the Post to not comment on the population surveyed.
For the more academically minded among us who have time in their day to watch, here's the academic talk given on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cJoiGQ7yj0 - I don't have time to watch it now, but totes will later.
See also: http://opencuny.org/laurenspradlin/the-morphophonology-of-to...
The presentation is really good: http://opencuny.org/laurenspradlin/files/2016/01/Totes-LSA-S...
This is really interesting too, from the same author: http://opencuny.org/laurenspradlin/class/ It's basically a phonology version of the card game Set.
The presentation is really good: http://opencuny.org/laurenspradlin/files/2016/01/Totes-LSA-S...
This is really interesting too, from the same author: http://opencuny.org/laurenspradlin/class/ It's basically a phonology version of the card game Set.
I'm a 40 y/o proud GenX'er (best generation ever!) who has a 21 y/o daughter AND just went back to university to finish my degree–so I'm knee-deep in Millennials.
In my experience, Millennials don't talk like this in-person. I do see a little bit of it in SnapChat, YikYak and Instagram. In fact, my wife says "totes" more than any 20-something I've witnessed. Other "words" I've seen used a lot during app communication are "bruh", "fam", and "af".
But when I observe 2 Millennials talking in person, the only way they butcher the English language is by using the word "LIKE" 4 times per sentence. Makes me cringe every time!
In my experience, Millennials don't talk like this in-person. I do see a little bit of it in SnapChat, YikYak and Instagram. In fact, my wife says "totes" more than any 20-something I've witnessed. Other "words" I've seen used a lot during app communication are "bruh", "fam", and "af".
But when I observe 2 Millennials talking in person, the only way they butcher the English language is by using the word "LIKE" 4 times per sentence. Makes me cringe every time!
I have that same reaction and feel old about it. The other day I came across a stand-up comedy video of Donald Glover (who I loved as Troy in Community), and the constant 'likes' made me unable to enjoy the video. Odd, that.
Yeah, but it's not like this is new behavior or like anything, like, unprecedented or something like that....
Gag me with a spoon!
> There’s a way that young people talk these days, and it’s totes hilars. You see it on Twitter a lot.
Makes a lot of sense. Speaking to other humans in real life maps perfectly to ideation, generating that into text, and then uploading it to a website that has a 160char limit. Speaking requires a lot of effort because not only do you think of what you want to say, but then you have to verbalize it.
Online, people obviously have to do the first part, but it is so much easier to then find all of the keys associated with an individual word and input them on the per sentence basis, plus you get to include proper punctuation and additional characters which makes this way easier.
This article is super interesting. Language hasn't evolved or changed (even slightly) in the preceding hundred years. It's really weird to think we have been using the same language that came out of Egypt in 2690 b.c. In fact, we still use the same hieroglyphs that adorned the walls of the great pyramid of Giza.
It is pretty amazing if you think about it. From cave paintings, to papyrus scrolls and eventually to Gutenberg's PP, shit even with the digital communications and texting in the 80's and 90's, language has stayed the same.
If this language was good enough for Shakespeare, millenials, the people who often pick up the physical Washington Times everyday, should think twice before foraging on with these nonsensical changes.
Also, the world is more closed now than ever, so ideas often spread slower. Which makes this even more astounding!
Makes a lot of sense. Speaking to other humans in real life maps perfectly to ideation, generating that into text, and then uploading it to a website that has a 160char limit. Speaking requires a lot of effort because not only do you think of what you want to say, but then you have to verbalize it.
Online, people obviously have to do the first part, but it is so much easier to then find all of the keys associated with an individual word and input them on the per sentence basis, plus you get to include proper punctuation and additional characters which makes this way easier.
This article is super interesting. Language hasn't evolved or changed (even slightly) in the preceding hundred years. It's really weird to think we have been using the same language that came out of Egypt in 2690 b.c. In fact, we still use the same hieroglyphs that adorned the walls of the great pyramid of Giza.
It is pretty amazing if you think about it. From cave paintings, to papyrus scrolls and eventually to Gutenberg's PP, shit even with the digital communications and texting in the 80's and 90's, language has stayed the same.
If this language was good enough for Shakespeare, millenials, the people who often pick up the physical Washington Times everyday, should think twice before foraging on with these nonsensical changes.
Also, the world is more closed now than ever, so ideas often spread slower. Which makes this even more astounding!
As a millennial, I'm pretty sure this isn't my generation but the next one down. Don't know if they have a name yet.
Are you perhaps a 25+ millennial? I'm at the front (as in, the beginning) of what is generally called the millennial generation, and I feel old around the younger millennials. 20 years is a long time.
I've been calling them the tablet generation. Tablet kids.
Tiblets.
Yeah I totes have no idea what this article is talking about.
I see literally none of this. Born in the early 90s. I'm a "millennial" right?
Or is this using the definition of millennial that is those born in the early aughts - just now turning the age it's legal to collect information on them without verifiable parent's permission (thanks, COPPA!)
I see literally none of this. Born in the early 90s. I'm a "millennial" right?
Or is this using the definition of millennial that is those born in the early aughts - just now turning the age it's legal to collect information on them without verifiable parent's permission (thanks, COPPA!)
So as someone who also is lumped into that category, I think it is intentional that the "Generation" they have created and are hyping is so large as to cover at least three discreet cultural groupings of people ( 80 to very early 90's, 90's to dot-com bubble, post twin towers ). However each of those groups who's cultural upbringing and psyche will vary greatly don't make a compelling group to market to, so they have taken the least common denominator of all three groups and lumped everyone into that so they have something they can sell to.
People who are one generation down also look at individuals who talk like this with distain, but all of us have a small portion of people our age who do participate in this kind of behavior and even though its a minority its a plurality so thats what gets marketed.
People who are one generation down also look at individuals who talk like this with distain, but all of us have a small portion of people our age who do participate in this kind of behavior and even though its a minority its a plurality so thats what gets marketed.
As a millennial who talks with the next generation relatively often (younger cousins and the like), I don't think they talk like what was described in the article.
BTW: I've heard the term "Generation Net", as in the generation that grew up after the explosion of AOL / Internet. Generation Net is younger than AOL and never knew a world without the internet.
In my experience, "Generation Net" types with more proper english... pretend to be older, so that they can be taken more seriously online. Without pictures or face-to-face contact, "Generation Net" plays on equal grounds among us on the internet / online forums.
From an online perspective, "Generation Net" is growing up faster than us. They have to deal with griefers in their Minecraft and swatters on their streams on a regular basis. Their face-to-face social skills seem a bit stunted, but that could be only because they're awkward teenagers right now.
BTW: I've heard the term "Generation Net", as in the generation that grew up after the explosion of AOL / Internet. Generation Net is younger than AOL and never knew a world without the internet.
In my experience, "Generation Net" types with more proper english... pretend to be older, so that they can be taken more seriously online. Without pictures or face-to-face contact, "Generation Net" plays on equal grounds among us on the internet / online forums.
From an online perspective, "Generation Net" is growing up faster than us. They have to deal with griefers in their Minecraft and swatters on their streams on a regular basis. Their face-to-face social skills seem a bit stunted, but that could be only because they're awkward teenagers right now.
[deleted]
What year ranges are we talking about? Millennials are themselves sometimes called the "Net Generation".
I suppose I'm a millennial, but I'm really struggling to find a single person that actually talks like this.
It's not millenials. I think it's post-millenials which doesn't have a name yet.
Okay then... I guess it is "us". I just don't have any friends who use that I guess.
I'm 24 and I and a lot of my friends talk and text/chat the way callmeed talks about. The number of times we use "bruh" and "af" in one day is incredible.
This type of rhetoric about how "the kids" talks comes up every 20 years. Remember "radical"?
I remember 'totes'.
Every once in a while, a reporter 'discovers' their social locale's vernacular, concludes that aren't a reporter but an ethnographer, and declares a generational language revolution.
Every once in a while, a reporter 'discovers' their social locale's vernacular, concludes that aren't a reporter but an ethnographer, and declares a generational language revolution.
There was a lot of us who didn't use slang. So much of it was on t.v. though, you'd come away thinking it everyone was using Surfer slang.
There was one word that drove me nuts though, and so many of us were guilty of using it. It was dude. My best friend at the time decide to call he dude. I said please don't "dude me". When I referred to him as dude in every sentance over a few pints it magically stopped the next day at work.
There was one word that drove me nuts though, and so many of us were guilty of using it. It was dude. My best friend at the time decide to call he dude. I said please don't "dude me". When I referred to him as dude in every sentance over a few pints it magically stopped the next day at work.
Total tangent but: one piece of LOL I've been noting lately is Gen-Xers talking about how "kids these days" are too mainstream and too pro-establishment and are not rebellious enough. Where's their hate for authority? Where's their angry edgy music? Where's their drug use?
Rhetoric? It's just a linguistic analysis.
It'd be surprising if the Internet revolution didn't drastically alter languages. The printing press did the same, standardizing them and eliminating many font eccentricities that did not translate well into movable type.
What I see in these is (1) shortening of things to make them easier to type on phones, and (2) the use of a lot of whimsical spellings to convey emotion. People are communicating so much right now via just text that they're going to strain to emote through the medium.
What I see in these is (1) shortening of things to make them easier to type on phones, and (2) the use of a lot of whimsical spellings to convey emotion. People are communicating so much right now via just text that they're going to strain to emote through the medium.
I think this particular pattern is a fad. It's interesting linguistically because the rules are relatively simple, and it's easy enough to analyze it in the context of changing social dynamics, but most people writing like this are doing so to declare membership in some particular social group and as it becomes more popular it will no longer be a status symbol and fall out of favor. The linguisitic construction might survive to serve a different purpose later though. Even now I see people mimicking it to convey a certain type of sarcasm (and I suspect almost everyone who uses it is at least somewhat sarcastic about it).
But the point that trjordan brings up in their top-level comment, "Figuring out ways to invent slang so it cleanly translates to written text is pretty hard," gets closer to the core observation, which is that the new phenomenon of informal written communication transmitted in small chunks (IM and tweets, mostly) will have, and already has had, a profound impact on language.
Another observation: I spoken communication I try to avoid phrases like "to be honest," "if I recall correctly," etc. because they should be implied: "to be honest" only indicates that previously you may have been lying, and "if I recall correctly" insults your correspondant's ability listen to you critcically — of course "if you recall correctly," everything is "if you recall correctly." But in IM, dropping an extra "tbh" or "iirc" or "idk" into your message changes the inflection of the message, and in a medium so devoid of inflection, that small change can significantly impact meaning. Such phrases are the part of the "body language" of textual communication.
And I notice these communication spilling over into spoken communication. When I speak with somebody now, especially if I usually communicate with them over text, "to be honests" abound!
I predict that in 50 years we'll see that instant messaging has transformed human communication more than the telephone or printing press ever did. The shift will be second only to the rise of mass-literacy.
But the point that trjordan brings up in their top-level comment, "Figuring out ways to invent slang so it cleanly translates to written text is pretty hard," gets closer to the core observation, which is that the new phenomenon of informal written communication transmitted in small chunks (IM and tweets, mostly) will have, and already has had, a profound impact on language.
Another observation: I spoken communication I try to avoid phrases like "to be honest," "if I recall correctly," etc. because they should be implied: "to be honest" only indicates that previously you may have been lying, and "if I recall correctly" insults your correspondant's ability listen to you critcically — of course "if you recall correctly," everything is "if you recall correctly." But in IM, dropping an extra "tbh" or "iirc" or "idk" into your message changes the inflection of the message, and in a medium so devoid of inflection, that small change can significantly impact meaning. Such phrases are the part of the "body language" of textual communication.
And I notice these communication spilling over into spoken communication. When I speak with somebody now, especially if I usually communicate with them over text, "to be honests" abound!
I predict that in 50 years we'll see that instant messaging has transformed human communication more than the telephone or printing press ever did. The shift will be second only to the rise of mass-literacy.
Some of these patterns are useful, especially to the careful listener. For example, the tech world has many helpful people who flag sentences that can be safely ignored by the listener by starting them with "So, ... ".
This is something I talk about with my friend who is doing a PhD in linguistics. I noticed as well that the internet is changing the English language. The rampant globalization that came with the internet combined with English being the defacto language of the internet has allowed it to change. It would be interested to mine Twitter and a few other sources and try to observe how English is changing.
I suspect if you mined Twitter, you would see a 'dumbing down' of English due to the constraints of Twitter. How one would quantify 'dumbing down' is a challenge (if it hasn't been solved already). However, I am more interested in how this 'Twitter effect' cascades to other areas of English.
There are other implications of the internet too I'd love to study but these questions are relevant to this article.
I suspect if you mined Twitter, you would see a 'dumbing down' of English due to the constraints of Twitter. How one would quantify 'dumbing down' is a challenge (if it hasn't been solved already). However, I am more interested in how this 'Twitter effect' cascades to other areas of English.
There are other implications of the internet too I'd love to study but these questions are relevant to this article.
> English being the defacto language of the internet
That's quite a statement. There is a huge volume of Spanish content that you'd never realize was there until you typed in a Spanish query into a search engine. The various language webs are for the most part islands. English is a little bit over-represented on the web but this is mostly because of the fact that in the early days the English web moved quite rapid and other countries slowly caught up as they came online.
Over the long haul this will normalize to representation roughly proportional on the world population. For our profession English will always give you a head-start.
That's quite a statement. There is a huge volume of Spanish content that you'd never realize was there until you typed in a Spanish query into a search engine. The various language webs are for the most part islands. English is a little bit over-represented on the web but this is mostly because of the fact that in the early days the English web moved quite rapid and other countries slowly caught up as they came online.
Over the long haul this will normalize to representation roughly proportional on the world population. For our profession English will always give you a head-start.
Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse [...]
And loven novelries.
-Chaucer (Squire's Tale)
-Chaucer (Squire's Tale)
I will happily support all of these changes to the written English language if the millennials would please try to rein in the vocal fry that's made NPR unlistenable.
I believe what's made NPR unlistenable is that you've decided a particular vocal affectation is objectively bad and annoying, so you notice it more and let the concept bother you. Personally, I can't help but smirk any time a talking head on cable news uses their `important newsperson voice`, but not everyone feels that way.
I would be curious to see if someone has studied how twitter has changed english language and grammer rules due to its 150 char limit
[deleted]
I'm technically a Millennial (born 1984), but everything about Millennial culture just makes me cringe.
Same with this obsession with "artisanal" stuff, walkable neighborhoods, and the like.
Same with this obsession with "artisanal" stuff, walkable neighborhoods, and the like.
What's wrong with wanting a walkable neighborhood and things produced by craftsmen instead of Chinese mass laborers?
I the the objection is to the obsession with such things. Talking/posting about it all the time, etc. It's an unalloyed truth that artisanal pickles and cheese, purchased from local craftspeople, transported home on a workcycle, enjoyed on a freshly baked ciabatta, are the greatest things ever.
Chinese mass laborers make In-N-Out burgers?
Walkable neighborhoods aren't particularly a problem, it's that the people that advocate for it pretty aggressively attack suburban living's support system to do so (cars, freeways, etc).
Walkable neighborhoods aren't particularly a problem, it's that the people that advocate for it pretty aggressively attack suburban living's support system to do so (cars, freeways, etc).
Cars and freeways are both examples of extreme largesse and horrible community planning. Freeways are some of the world's most dangerous public territories. Why would you discourage individuals from criticizing and judging these outdated, expensive, pollution death traps?
I wouldn't lump "artisanal" and "walkable" as Millennial values. Remember back in the 80's we used to have neighborhoods we could move around in, and we would get things from local stores. Then as the 80's progressed and the 90's and 00's got underway we isolated people into sprawling sub-urban developments and everything became mass market and cheap. The older "Millennials" want to return to what we remember from our early early childhood, and I think that is different from the "I need everything in walking distance because I don't want a car" crowd
Born a year earlier: I love artisanal walkable neighborhoods handcrafted by locals. (to mock my own desires. :-) ).
Can you expand more?
Can you expand more?
Awesome!
Also groovy.
And formidable.
Also groovy.
And formidable.
As usual, the trick while reading these is to replace 'millennial' with 'people younger and more attractive than I am'. Also applies to people who begin sentences with 'I am technically a millennial but..'.
Wasn't it plato or Socrates who complained about those damn young people who are good for nothing, complain about everything, and can't even speak proper Greek?
To their credit though, the Greek civilization DID fall soon-ish, so maybe the YOUNGs are _really_ screwy idiots who are NOT on fleek.
EDIT: Apparently I'd misunderstood the meaning of 'on fleek' for a long time.
Wasn't it plato or Socrates who complained about those damn young people who are good for nothing, complain about everything, and can't even speak proper Greek?
To their credit though, the Greek civilization DID fall soon-ish, so maybe the YOUNGs are _really_ screwy idiots who are NOT on fleek.
EDIT: Apparently I'd misunderstood the meaning of 'on fleek' for a long time.
> replace 'millennial' with 'people younger and more attractive than I am'.
... which in my case could then just be shortened to "human".
... which in my case could then just be shortened to "human".
> it’s following all the rules of English.
Doesn't English require proper spelling of English words?
Doesn't English require proper spelling of English words?
140 char lims are tuff k?
The main reason I posted this is to consider the NLP implication of it.
As the article points out, 140 characters is not what's driving this. If you're using standard English everywhere, your Facebook posts sound like your cover letters, and that's weird. For a generation who's been dubbed "amiable" as one of the highest virtues, this isn't OK. Figuring out ways to invent slang so it cleanly translates to written text is pretty hard. This is a pretty clever solution to that: anybody who's a native speaker can do it, if you read it out loud, it serializes / deserializes pretty well, and it's novel.
FWIW, I'm 30, and I do know people who talk / tweet like this. It's mostly done sarcastically, though when you do it all the time, is it really sarcastic?