mishaphilia:

pulpofiction:

crowleyaziraphale:

edgebug:

turnabout-taisa:

my-singing-soul:

why is it that all the most popular posts on tumblr

are written like this

with no capitals

and no punctuation

i just really want there to be a popular and grammatically correct post on tumblr

I think the majority of Tumblr’s dialect (is there a word for a written dialect? Hardly anyone speaks Tumblr.) comes from influence within the tag system.

My theory is that the lack of capitalization is stylized, ironic laziness (same reason as the increasingly popular use of abbreviations such as idek and ikr, and particles like desu), whereas the punctuation stems from the tag system, where commas split up tags. So, “this is like, so totally cool” would be tagged “this is like” “so totally cool.”

With commas struck from the tumblr blogger’s arsenal, they rely on run-on sentences and other means to show emphasis. One such means, spacing, is another quirk influenced by the tags. If you repeat a tag, it will only show once, which is why you get “really r e a l l y weird things like this.”

Also common on Tumblr are people who show their enthusiasm through their text by pretending their haNDS ARE FRKEAKIGN OUT AN D THEY CANT TPYE OMFGGGG. This adaptation is actually pretty cool, I think, as it serves to communicate tone across a very toneless medium.

Did you hear that noise? That was the sound of my desk breaking. My linguistics boner just snapped it in half.

 #we’ve created our own language with its own set of rules and guidelines #based on the environment #that is cool #if you don’t think that’s cool you’re wrong

When we talk to someone face-to-face, we rely not just on the words they say but the things they do in tandem with the words they say to understand their meanings, both explicit and implicit - things like tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, etc. This concept is called embodied interaction; meanings are signaled by movements embodied in one’s physical presence and related motions.

When we use the Internet, embodied interaction is completely different because we don’t have things like tone of voice or body language with which to understand and construct meanings when interacting with other people. This doesn’t mean conversation is different (conversational structures are arguably identical on the Internet as they are offline); this just means the way embodied interaction occurs is different. We invent new resources to replace the ones that are lost: typing styles, reaction images, tag commentary, and so on.

my research let me show you it

i’m sO DONE rn

i cna’t