Linguist Gretchen McCulloch says Twitter banter and text-speak are signs of an evolving language — and that’s good.
Texting, posting, and emailing has become a key part of how we communicate in our lives and relationships, so much so that it’s fundamentally changing language and communication. According to linguist Gretchen McCulloch, the author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language and co-host of the podcast Lingthusiasm, it’s making us better writers, speakers, and communicators.
So all our SMHs and Kim Kardashian crying memes aren’t eviscerating the English language? Tell that to the English teachers of the world — and the mansplainers on Tinder.
“Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project,” writes McCulloch, who studies and analyzes the patterns of internet language. “Just as we find things on the internet by following links from one place to another, language spreads and disseminates through our conversations and interactions.”
Today’s digital natives are expected to be bilingual in both formal English and informal internet-speak — and know when it’s appropriate to use them (like when you’re emailing your boss versus texting your crush).

And the answer to our #GuessTheLocation #emoji challenge is...

WITCHFORD 🧙‍♀️✨

Well done to our app ticket…

Combined Emoji, has different length in utf8, 16 and 32

Git Commit Message StyleGuide

with emoji

From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for this is less insightful than it first appears and that Swift’s approach to string length isn’t unambiguously the best one. Python 3’s approach is unambiguously the worst one, though.