Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
Arch, misspelled, often punctuation-free: writing online has become a distinct genre. But behind the studied carelessness is real linguistic innovation.
Towards the end of the last decade, a distinctive minimalist style emerged among the users of the micro-blogging site Tumblr. Capital letters were largely dispensed with, save for EMPHASIS; punctuation became notable by its absence; hashtags were used mostly for irony (#wild). It didn’t take long for the site’s users – who skewed young, female and literate compared with the rest of the internet – to provide their own meta-commentary on what was happening. One post, from 2012, gained more than half a million likes:
when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
Or as other users put it:it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE