The Tower of Babel is a Biblical explanation of why we all speak different languages. The story goes that humans tried to build a tower so tall they could reach the Heavens. God, unimpressed with ...

Around half the world’s population still lacks access to the internet. Companies like Facebook, SpaceX, and Amazon want to change that by launching constellations of satellites into the sky, which ...

The Oxford comma. “Ask” instead of “aks.” There, their, and they’re. The legitimacy of “ain’t” and “y’all.” These are familiar, if sometimes contentious, issues in the usage of the English language.

If I started a sentence with “Ermahgerd,” misspelled “the” as “teh” or dropped a “1” in a string of exclamation points, and that sentence made sense to you — or even made you smile a bit — ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” the linguist Gretchen ...

You recall back in 2004 when George W. Bush referred to "rumors on the Internets." That instantly became a classic Bushism, but to my mind he got it right — not just because what we call the Internet ...

Zachary Jaggers receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Views presented in this article do not represent views of the Foundation. Melissa Michaud Baese-Berk receives funding from the ...

I first came across Gretchen McCulloch’s writing on internet linguistics in a piece for the now-defunct website, “The Toast.” It was about how sarcasm developed online, and began like this: “Sarcasm.

The following is an excerpt of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. Imagine learning to talk from recordings rather than people. If you learned how to have ...

These are tough times for grammar snobs, those would-be avatars of flawless spelling and proper syntax who need look no further than a high-school friend’s Facebook posts or a family member’s text ...

Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” linguist Gretchen McCulloch acknowledges a paradox at the heart of her book. On the one hand, books about usage tend to ...

Social media has created an entirely new linguistic ecosystem, with new words, phrases and features for expressing ourselves cropping up all the time. As the year winds down, we’ll walk you through ...