Nostalgia used to be called mal du Suisse—the Swiss sickness. Their mercenaries were all over Europe and were apparently notorious for wanting to go home. They would get misty and sing shepherd ballads instead of fighting, and when you’re the king of France with Huguenots to burn, songs won’t do. The ballads were banned. In the American Civil War nostalgia was such a problem it put some 5,000 troops out of action, and 74 men died of it—at least according to army medical records. Given the circumstances, being sad to death is actually kind of understandable, but then again, this was also the time of leeches and the bonesaw, so who knows what was really going on. It’s interesting to think that in those days, many of the people who left home did so to go to war—much of the early literature on nostalgia, which was seen then as a bona fide disease, mentions soldiers. In that sepia-toned way I can’t help but think about the past, I like to imagine scientists in 1863, on either side of the Potomac, working furiously against the clock to develop the ultimate war-ending superweapon: high school yearbooks.
I actually don’t even know if they have high school yearbooks anymore. It’s hard to see why you’d need one now that Facebook’s around, although according to the company’s last quarterly report, people under eighteen aren’t using Facebook as much as they used to. So maybe the kids need the printed copy again, I don’t know.1 But however teenagers are staying in touch—whether it’s through Snapchat or WhatsApp or Twitter—I’m positive they’re doing it with words. Pictures are part of the appeal of all of these services, obviously, but you can only say so much without a keyboard. Even on Instagram, the comments and the captions are essential—the photo after all is just a few inches square. But the words are the words are the words. They’re still how feelings come across and how connections are made.
In fact, for all the hand-wringing over technology’s effect on our culture, I am certain that even the most reticent teenager in 2014 has written far more in his life than I or any of my classmates had back in the early ’90s. Back then, if you needed to talk to someone you used the phone. I wrote a few stiff thank-you notes and maybe one letter a year. The typical high school student today must surpass that in a morning. The Internet has many regrettable sides to it, but that’s one thing that’s always stood it in good stead with me: it’s a writer’s world. Your life online is mediated through words. You work, you socialize, you flirt, all by typing. I honestly feel there’s a certain epistolary, Austenian grandness to the whole enterprise. No matter what words we use or how we tap out the letters, we’re writing to one another more than ever. Even if sometimes
dam gerl
is all we have to say.
Major Sullivan Ballou was one of the soldiers in the Union army, on the Potomac, suffering, and homesick. Early in Ken Burns’s The Civil War, a narrator reads his farewell letter to his wife, to his “very dear Sarah,” and it’s a moving and important moment in the film. The Major was writing from camp before the first large battle of the war, and he was mortally wounded days later. His words were the last his family would ever hear from him, and they drove home the greater sorrow the nation would face in the years to come. Because of the exposure, the Ballou letter has become one of the most famous ever written—when I search for “famous letter,” Google lists it second. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, but think of all the other letters that will never be read aloud, that were burned, lost in some shuffle, or carried off by the wind, or that just moldered away.
Today we don’t have to rely on the lucky accident of preservation to know what someone was thinking or how he talked, and we don’t need the one to stand in for the many. It’s all preserved, not just one man to one wife before one battle, but all to all, before and after and even in the middle of each of our personal battles. You can find readings of the Ballou letter on YouTube, and many of the comments are along the lines of “They just don’t make them like that anymore.” That’s true. But what they, or rather we, are making offers a richness and a beauty of a different kind: a poetry not of lyrical phrases but of understanding. We are at the cusp of momentous change in the study of human communication and what it tries to foster: community and personal connection.
When you want to learn about how people write, their unpolished, unguarded words are the best place to start, and we have reams of them. There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed. It’s the epitome of the new communication: short and in real time. Twitter was, in fact, the first service not only to encourage brevity and immediacy, but to require them. Its prompt is “What’s happening?” and it gives users 140 characters to tell the world. And Twitter’s sudden popularity, as much as its sudden redefinition of writing, seemed to confirm the fear that the Internet was “killing our culture.” How could people continue to write well (and even think well) in this new confined space—what would become of a mind so restricted? The actor Ralph Fiennes spoke for many when he said, “You only have to look on Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used, say, in Shakespeare’s plays or P. G. Wodehouse novels … are so little used that people don’t even know what they mean now.”
Even basic analysis shows that language on Twitter is far from a degraded form. Below, I’ve compared the most common words on Twitter against the Oxford English Corpus—a collection of nearly 2.5 billion words of modern writing of all kinds—journalism, novels, blogs, papers, everything. The OEC is the canonical census of the current English vocabulary. I’ve charted only the top 100 words out of the tens of thousands that people use, which may seem like a paltry sample, but roughly half of all writing is formed from these words alone (both on Twitter and in the OEC). The most important thing to notice on Twitter’s list is this: despite the grumblings from the weathered sentinels atop Fortress English, there are only two “netspeak” entries—rt, for “retweet” and u, for “you”—in the top 100. You’d think that contractions, grammatical or otherwise, would be staples of a form that only allows a person 140 characters, but instead people seem to be writing around the limitation rather than stubbornly through it. Second, when you calculate the average word length of the Twitter list, it’s longer than the OEC’s: 4.3 characters to 3.4. And look beyond length to the content of the Twitter vocabulary. I’ve highlighted the words unique to it in order to make the comparison easier...
[TABLE REMOVED]
While the OEC list is rather drab, lots of helpers and modifiers—workmanlike language to get you to some payoff noun or verb—on Twitter, there’s no room for functionaries; every word’s gotta be boss. So you see vivid stuff like:
love
happy
life
today
best
never
home
… make the top 100 cut. Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters—it embodies William Strunk’s famous dictum, Omit needless words, at the keystroke level. A person tweeting has no option but concision, and in a backward way the character limit actually explains the slightly longer word length we see. Given finite room to work, longer words mean fewer spaces between them, which means less waste. Although the thoughts expressed on Twitter may be foreshortened, there’s no evidence here that they’re diminished.
~~Dataclysm : Who We Are* -by- Christian Rudder
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