#allthingslinguistic
anemotionallyunstablecreature:
*raises hand* Hi. So - the use of a keysmash is emotive. You use it to indicate that you’re so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t even type, you’re just flailing at the keyboard.a6:
u kno when u keysmash but the jumble of letters dont convery the right Feeling so u gotta backspace and re-keysmash to turn ur HKELSXPXA to a JKFSDKAS
Vaguely wondering how future anthropologists will explain this…
So why is there a difference between a “hkelsxpxa” and a “jkfsdkas” or an “asdfs”?
Because language evolves! It’s actually really exciting to think about, but there’s a reason why slang is continually changing and why Old People are usually characterized by not knowing the slang variants that are being used by The Youth - it’s because the way we use words changes over time, especially in response to technological or environmental changes.
And text-based communication - texting someone on your phone, or chatting with friends on Skype or Discord - is actually really new, this is something which started in my lifetime. And grammatical rules have been evolving and settling into place around that form of communication.
For instance, linguistic researchers have noticed that anyone who’s grown up with texting being a normal thing will usually not end their texts or IMs with a period unless they’re angry or annoyed. This is because it’s a lot harder to do a run-on sentence in those mediums; you can just hit ‘enter’ and go to a new line. A period, then, becomes an indicator of emphasis, instead of an indicator of “there is nothing missing from this sentence” - and it’s an indicator of negative emphasis (rather than the positive emphasis that an exclaimation mark can give).
So, the keysmash has its own grammatical rule. And it’s one that makes sense, considering that it’s entirely possible for a keysmash to be caused accidentally - by something falling onto the keyboard, or a cat walking across it. The rule, then, is that a deliberate keysmash and an accidental one need to be distinguishable.
So a deliberate keysmash will nearly always use keys only in the home row, and usually in a particular order that isn’t likely to have happened purely accidentally.
So, future anthropologists will likely explain it as a marker of language evolving to work with a text-based medium where expressions and body language are difficult-to-impossible to convey. Much like emojis, crytyping, and whether or not you put punctuation at the end of a sentence (and in what context you do so), keysmashing is used to convey how you feel - in a way that body language and facial expressions would usually be expected to fill in the gap.
I did a survey once of people who use keysmash and over half of people reported that they’d adjust a few letters or delete and re-smash when it didn’t look “right” (except for the poor Dvorak users, who had kind of given up on keysmash entirely because their vowely home row made theirs emotionally illegible to other people).
2017 was a year where lots of things I’d been working on in the years prior were finally ready to share! I’ve made my ‘top 10 things about 2017′ list below, and most of them are really building on work done in 2015 and 2016.
Similarly, there are already things in the pipeline for 2018 that I’m looking forward to sharing with you. It will be the second year of my three-year postdoc at La Trobe university, so things on that project are picking up steam, but I don’t have to get too distracted by job-hunting yet.
Top Superlinguo posts of 2017
- The Standard Lexical Sets for English as emoji
- Email is a genre: A genre you can be awesome at
- Chart of the most common speech sounds across languages
- The Great Language Game became The Great Language Experiment (and it has a sequel!)
- The relationship between gesture and thinking/speaking
- Review of Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
- A sentence containing (almost) all the vowel sounds of English
- Why say ‘nieces and nephews’ when you can say ‘niblings’?
- Linguistics and Language Podcasts
- Lauren’s PhD/Postdoc tips
- What gesture can teach us about emoji
- Why can you behead someone, but you can’t beleg them?
- The Research Unit for Indigenous Language (RUIL) language memes
- Schwa cookie-cutter
Lingthusiasm podcast links for 2017
Lingthusiasm was one of my 2017 highlights. Working with Gretchen McCulloch on this project is a delight, mostly because we both just really love talking about linguistics. You can find all of our episodes here, below are the 2017 episodes:
4.Inside the Word of the Year vote
5.Colour words around the world and inside your brain
6.All the sounds in all the languages – the International Phonetic Alphabet
7.Kids these days aren’t ruining language
8.People who make dictionaries: Review of Kory Stamper’s book Word by Word
9.The bridge between words and sentences — Constituency
10.Learning languages linguistically
11.Layers of meaning — Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
12.Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes
13.What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
14.Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions
15.Talking and thinking about timeWe launched a Patreon for the podcast, and released 10 bonus episodes there. We now also have lingthusiastic merch, including:
- scarves with a subtly nerdy IPA print on them,
- stickers with our logo,
- various items that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT.
My Top 10 Things of 2017
I did this as a Twitter list last year, but I like that it provided me with a summary of proof that I had got things done, so here’s my list for 2017.
1.Lingthusiasm took on a life of its own. The podcast that I co-host with Gretchen McCulloch is now over a year old. A year in we reached over 100k listens! We also have a financially viable model through our Patreon,two full episodes a month, and some great merch. We also did a sold-out liveshow at Argo Bookshop in Montreal.
2.The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics were published. I became a founding co-chair of the Linguistics Data Interest Group, a new RDA group to improve data citation and transparency. The Austin Principles are one of our first outputs.
3. My edited volume with Nathan Hill was published. Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages also has a chapter I wrote with Nathan, and one I wrote myself. I also did the book’s index, so I learnt a new skill.
4. I started a new journal sub-series with Peter Austin in Language Documentation and Description. The Language Contexts series started with my article about Syuba.
5. I also published an article in i-Perception with Suzy Stylesonour failure to replicate the maluma/takete effect, and an article in Language Documentation & Conservation with Barb Kelly, Andrea Berez-Kroeker and Tyler Heston about the need for better transparency in methods and data citation in descriptive grammar writing.
6.The Syuba language archive is now available open access through Paradisec. We used the materials to make this picture book of Stories and Songs from Kagate, which is beautiful (beautiful, I cannot stop pointing out how beautiful it is).
7. I wrote my 100th By Lingo piece in The Big Issue. These short pieces about the history of everyday words are still a delight to write. Check out the By Lingo tag for some of the ones I’ve shared on the blog!
8. We celebrated Two years of Superlinguo Linguistics Jobs interviews. I’ll be continuing to interview people who studied linguistics and who now do interesting non-academic jobs. Check out the linguistics jobs tag to read people’s stories.
9.I wrote about some of my favourite gesture research for Grammar Girl! and David J. Peterson came to SOAS to talk about conlanging.
10. I became a Member of the Executive of the Research Network for Linguistic Diversity, and a Vice-President of the Australian Linguistics Society. I look forward to the plans we have for 2018!
See also:
It is, as ever, a delight to keep working with Lauren Gawne, and it was especially fun to get to introduce her to North American linguists at LSA this weekend!
