AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!!

Called a Best Publication of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, as well as the Washington Post

A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer

“Gretchen McCulloch may be the internet’s favourite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her function is like all of a sudden being able to start to see the matrix.” -Jonny Sunlight, author of everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn as well

Because Internet is for anybody who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text or wondered where memes come about Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Vocabulary from. It’s the perfect book for focusing on how the internet is definitely changing the British language, why that is clearly a positive thing, and what our online interactions expose about who we are.

Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project, and the web is building our language change faster and in more interesting ways than previously. Internet interactions are structured by the form of our apps and systems, from the sentence structure of status improvements towards the protocols of feedback and @replies. Linguistically inventive social network spread brand-new slang and jargon with dizzying quickness. What’s more, social media is a huge laboratory of unedited, unfiltered phrases where we can watch language develop in real time.

Even the most absurd-looking slang offers genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep makes that shape human being vocabulary and influence the way we talk to each other. She explains how your initial social internet encounter influences whether you prefer ‘LOL’ or ‘lol,’ why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where hundreds of years of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have as a common factor with physical gestures, and the way the artfully disarrayed language of pet memes like lolcats and doggo produced them more likely to spread.