you might have noticed that all my posts have been written in a super informal style lately. so here’s a “why do you type like that now?” blog post. and sure, there’s an easy answer that lowercase aesthetics1 are part and parcel of queer+online+girlypop+zoomer sociolect (and at a certain level there’s kind of a foot-in-the-door phenomenon where “visibly transgender” is already a baseline level of professionally-offputting to begin with, so you’re already chained to conspicuity), but there’s more to it, i think.
there’s a quirk of history at play, too: informal written language is undergoing a very modern surge (& experiencing very fast evolution!) because before we had the internet the formal/informal+spoken/written split kinda looked like this:
| spoken | written | |
|---|---|---|
| formal | speech / lecture / presentation | essay / treatise / paper |
| informal | familial/friendly conversation | (some) letters, notes |
it’s not like informal writing was absent beforehand, but now we do sooo much casual socializing over text, & (at least in my experience in online English) we’re developing so many ways of conveying tone and gesture that speech has had for free for centuries :D
there’s also something else happening to written language right now: da computer. they’re making computer programs that can parse and use natural language now. that’s crazy.
as someone who’s been into computers and linguistics for basically her whole life, i do, of course, find language models extremely interesting2 - even devoid of all other capabilities, a computer program that can understand and emit natural language is like a snipe for specifically me! but i really, absolutely abhor LLM prose. i can’t really think of a better description for the root of my distaste for it other than that it’s calorically sparse: you’re kind of “inflating” little information into reams of excruciatingly median text, without adding any extra entropy in the process, really. more than anything, this is a question of etiquette: it’s rude to subject an unwitting person to something that will take more effort to digest than it took to produce - you’re expecting a reader to do the work of locating the small point inside a bunch of padding, which is definitely tiring and also, like, almost nauseating sometimes.
in a world where it seems like quadrillions of dollars are going to get funneled into building better probability distributions of median speech, i’m finding myself really drawn to getting weirder with it. idiosyncrasy is basically the best way to cope when drowning in a flood of impersonal simulacra of works: it’s a slop hardcounter to be eccentric in the face of the sanitized, inoffensive, and run-of-the-mill.
language, in my opinion, is a way to pull apart, like, a high-dimensional cognitive hyperobject (what you ‘mean’), serialize it into a sequence of words (what you ‘say’), and give it to a recipient who can turn it back into a meaning in their own cognitive hyperspace (what they ‘interpret’): in this communicative dance you are compressing a big ball of sememes into a shorter string of morphemes, relying on preconceived context upon decompression.3 i think LLMs approximate this compression pretty badly, and you end up with longer strings for few semantic bits of information. but as people we can do it really well, especially when we lean on subcultural dialects!!
my favorite language for this communicative dance has turned out to be English. since i got it stock from growing up in an anglophone country it does
feel a little like saying my favorite desktop operating system is Windows, but it’s true! i have an affinity for English because a lot of
nuance can be crammed into a paragraph just via word choice: you can be sooo incredibly succinct/
there’s a succinct word for almost every situation in English4 - e.g. depending on the specifics, “say” can become “mumble” / “blurt” / “confide” / “insist” / “proclaim”, “walk” can become “wander” / “stroll” / “pace” / “trudge” / “stride”, etc - you can convey soooo much subsurface meaning via intentional word choice, and the fact that you didn’t choose one of the ninety available synonyms with huge semantic-space overlap is additional information in and of itself! and, like, i want to be super clear for native english speakers: this is a rare quality for a major modern language to have! it’s so awesome!! it’s not that english has more words than other languages or anything, but such distinct semantic space is captured by near-synonyms that for a huge range of common contexts you end up with a superlatively fitting word almost always.
compound words & blends, well, compound this expressivity even further! and the internet is full of them in modern informal neologisms: you’ve seen it already in this article: how much easier is it to read my worksona than an artificial, sanitized façade i present and all the emotional labor its upkeep implies? nahhh just portez the manteau dude it’s fire. you can lean on playfulness and signal a pro-authenticity contra-plastic-compartmentalism attitude in 8 letters with a single blend word. when you’re trickshotmaxxing like this it’s secret sauce for semantic density and in that regard i think informal online english is basically peak expressivity for me :D
i like operating at peak expressivity on my own blog5 and i like being a little levitous with it and i like not having to run myself through a filter when i’m writing, so it’s gonna stay informal here. unless there’s something super serious to talk about, i guess. plus, it’s a polar opposite to any low-entropy extruded prose that you might find elsewhere :) keep dancing6 and be as you as you want when you’re in your own spot :3