OMG, the internet is ruining language, amirite? Wrong

OMG, the kids and the internet are ruining the English language, amirite? The sentiment is so common that it hardly bears a reply, except maybe “meh”. There is certainly plenty of terrible writing on the internet, plagued by indifferent spelling, punctuation and grammar and a lack of any attention to clarity. There is also lot of brilliant writing online. It is difficult to prove that digital technologies are actually making people into worse writers. It is likely that the world is just seeing more unfiltered thoughts written down than at any other time in history. People are not writing worse so much as writing and publishing far more.

But the internet is changing language. Words, phrases and new ways of playing with grammar are coming and going faster than ever before. Older generations have been complaining about the state of young people’s writing since a teacher of Sumerian complained about his charges 4,000 years ago. (“A junior scribe...does not pay attention to the scribal art.”) But language really is changing at a dizzying rate today, thanks to the speed with which innovations spread online.

This makes a book about language in the internet age a dicey proposition. It risks becoming dated in the lag between writing and the time the book hits the shelves. It also probably makes for a short shelf-life. But Emmy Favilla has nonetheless written “A World Without ‘Whom’” about her experiences as copy-chief of BuzzFeed. Famous for celebrity news, quizzes and listicles (“39 Pretty Gross Things All Couples Feel *Slightly* Guilty About”), BuzzFeed has also got into serious news, hiring its editor-in-chief from Politico and breaking political stories. But cleverly distracting clickbait remains its stock-in-trade.

Ms Favilla’s opening paragraph will make traditionalists cringe: “A world…without whom is the place I’d like to spend my golden years, basking in the sun, nary a subjunctive mood in sight, figurative literallys and comma splices frolicking about.” (The Economist disagrees on all counts.) The book goes on in this vein, ranking the standard punctuation marks from 13 to 1, BuzzFeed-style. (The apostrophe, “just kinda basic”, is in last place and the exclamation mark at number 1.) The pages are peppered with “lol” and emoji.

This may be all the proof some people need to conclude that the internet and the youth are going to be the death of English. And yet through the bulk of the book, Ms Favilla does something surprising: she offers guidance, opinions and very often, hard and fast rules about language. She frequently cites Buzzfeed’s own language polls, in which tens of thousands of readers enjoy expressing their linguistic views. Those readers are more conservative than you might think. On figurative “literally”, 39% vote “nooooo”, 40% vote “a little overused, but…not a disaster or anything” and just 21% “no problem!”

To some traditionalists this may be surprising. Doesn’t the modern era mean no rules at all? Hardly. Language still has rules, and Buzzfeed’s writers, editors and readers care about them. It is simply that the rules are more variable, and changing faster, than many people realise. The kids hardly capitalise or punctuate in their text messages, but when they write for school (or for publication) they know without a rap on the knuckles that different rules apply. And Ms Favilla is there to enforce those rules for BuzzFeed, alongside how to spell, punctuate and capitalise “yaaass”, “cray-cray” and “Bernie Bros” (look them up, if you must).

Curmudgeons would dismiss these as hardly real words, much less deserving of a style entry. But the point is that the language of the young is not random or careless. (Ms Favilla is particularly obsessive about hyphens and dashes; being called Emmy, she even has a tattoo of the proofreader’s mark for an em-dash behind her ear.) Young people want to be clear and entertaining, just like anyone else. Ms Favilla knows that readers can abandon BuzzFeed any time they like if the writing is no good. It is just that what they find good will often perplex their elders.

Take “Latinx”—a replacement for the masculine “Latino”, and purportedly an improvement on the earlier “Latin@”, which cleverly combined “Latino” and “Latina”, but which reinforced the notion that there are only two genders. Writers aiming for a classic style can reject this—like so many other BuzzFeed-era neologisms—as ugly or unnecessary. But they cannot say that the young people simply don’t care.