From hashtags to LOLs, how did the internet affect the English language: - Avatars This word for our digital incarnations has a marvellously mystical origin, beginning with the Sanskrit term avatara, describing the descent of a god from the heavens into earthly form. Arriving in English in the late 18th century, via Hindi, the term largely preserved its mystical meaning until Neal Stephensons 1992 novel Snow Crash first popularized it in a technological sense. Fusing notions of virtual world-building and incarnation, its the perfect emblem of computers as a portal to a new species of experience. - Hashtags In 1920s America, the # sign served as a shorthand for weight in pounds (and they still call it the pound sign). It was first brought to a wider public thanks to its adoption by telephone engineers at Bell Labs in the 1960s as the generic function symbol on their new touch-tone phones – and if youre looking to sound clever, you could call it an octothorpe, the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it. Its on Twitter, though, that hashtags have really come into their own, serving as a kind of function code for social interaction #ifyoulikethatkindofthing. - Trolling Although the archetypical emblem of an online troll is of a grinning bogeyman, the word can be traced back to the Old French verb troller, meaning to wander around while hunting. Trolling entered English around 1600 as a description of fishing by trailing bait around a body of water, and it was this idea of baiting the unwitting that led to the idea of online trolling, where experienced net users would simulate naivety in order ensnare the naive. The noun troll, meanwhile, does refer to a wide class of monstrous Nordic creatures: a sense that has dovetailed neatly with the increasingly viciously art of trolling. - Memes Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a shortening of the Ancient Greek term mimeme (an imitated thing). He designed his new word to sound like gene, signifying a unit of cultural transmission. Little did he know that his term would become one of the most iconic of online phenomena, embodying the capacity of the internet to itself act as a kind of gene-pool for thoughts and beliefs – and for infectious, endlessly ingenious slices of time-wasting. - Spam The most enduring gift of British comedy series Monty Pythons Flying Circus may prove to be a digital one: the term spam. The key episode, first broadcast in 1970, featured a sketch called SPAM: the brand name used since 1937 by the Hormel Foods Corporation as a contraction of the phrase spiced ham. Set in a cafe where almost every single item on the menu featured spam, the sketch culminated in a chorus of Viking warriors drowning everyone elses voices out by chanting the word spam. A satirical indictment of British culinary monotony, it took on a second life during the early 1980s, when those who wished to derail early online discussions copied out the same words repeatedly in order to clog up a debate. Inspired by Python, the word spam proved a popular way of doing this. Spamming came to describe any process of drowning out real content – and the rest is repetitive history. - LOLs If you type LOL or lol, youre not literally laughing out loud. Youre offering a kind of stage direction: dramatizing the process of typing. It sounds simple, but this is part of a radical change in language. For the first time in history, were conducting conversations through written words (or, more precisely, through typing onto screens). And in the process were expending immense effort on making words and symbols express the emotional range of face-to-face interactions. Yet its all, also, performance; a careful crafting of appearances that can bear little resemblance to reality. - Meh Theres a special place in my heart for the supremely useful three letters of meh, which express an almost infinitely flexible contemporary species of indifference. In its basic exclamatory form, it suggests something along the lines of OK, whatever. As an adjective, it takes on a more ineffable flavour: it was all very meh. You can even use it as a noun: I stand by my meh. Apparently first recorded in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, some theories trace meh back to the disdainful Yiddish term mnyeh. Its ascent towards canonical status, though, embodies a thoroughly digital breed of boredom. - Geeks Geek arrived in English from Low German, in which a geck denoted a crazy person; in travelling circuses, the geek show traditionally involved a performer biting off the heads of live chickens. By 1952, the sense of a freakishly adept technology enthusiast had appeared in science fiction maestro Robert Heinleins short story The Year of the Jackpot (the poor geek! being the phrase) – and by the 1980s it had become a common label for socially awkward children obsessed with new technological devices. As this generation of tech-savvy youngsters provided the first generation of internet millionaires, and then billionaires, the unthinkable happened: geeks became cool (not to mention chic) – and ready to inherit the earth.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:45:38 +0000
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