Opinion | How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years

Several of our common words were once acronyms from this era, such as “omg” (“oh my god”) and “wtf” (“what the” followed by an expletive then as now unprintable in these pages — some things have not changed). (Another word that started as an acronym was “ok,” but it’s even older, from the 19th century.) The acronymic history of these words has been obscured by the fact that they quickly shifted into being written in alllowercase so as to avoid confusion with allcaps for shouting, but there were once hundreds of words in this category, including the long-forgotten “rotflol” (“rolling on the floor laughing out loud”) and “hhoj” (“haha only joking”), as well as the deliciously archaic “afk” (“away from keyboard”).

The early 21st century was also a golden era for linguistic innovation related to using indirect constructed dialogue to convey actions and mental states. In speech, this era saw the rise of “be like” and in writing, the “me:” and *does something* conventions. (And I’m like, how did people even communicate their internal monologues without these?? also me: *shakes head* yeah I have no idea.) We now take these linguistic resources for granted, but at the time they represented a significant advancement in modeling complex emotions and other internal conditions on behalf of oneself and other people. Imagine being limited to the previous generation of dialogue tags, which attempted to slice everything into sharp distinctions between “said,” “felt” and “thought.”

Most intriguingly of all, I unearthed a psycholinguistic study from 2004 that examined how people conveyed sarcasm in writing when discussing fashion fails, but concluded that while participants did attempt to communicate written irony, the primary typographic resource at their disposal was the simple — and then still-ambiguous — dot dot dot. (“Oh wow, that dress is … ravishing.”) Similarly, a 2013 book by Keith Houston surveyed five centuries of philosophical proposals for indicating written irony, but in the end reported, “the irony mark (and, for that matter, the sarcasm mark) remains an elusive beast.”

Little did they know that barely a few years later, writers who had grown up with a rich inventory of typographic signals of importance or enthusiasm would develop the maturity to repurpose them into the detailed inventory of ironic double meaning that the world had been craving since a 1575 printer first proposed a mirrored question mark (؟) to distinguish rhetorical questions. A book from 2019 details the beginnings of such a list, including “scare quotes,” Pseudo-Important Caps, the ~ironic ~tilde, ✨faux-enthusiastic sparkles✨, s p a c e s t r e t c h e d d e a d p a n, and the. passive. aggressive. period.

So you’d imagine that early-21st-century people would have been really excited about this fascinating era that they were living in, right?