I presented a paper titled “I think writing is a pretty cool guy. eh makes meaning and doesnt afraid of anything” at my first-ever Computers & Writing. My presentation was about the role of accidental grammatical errors in the selection of memes and evolution of 4chan’s dialect, and the purpose of memes perpetuating grammar mistakes.
I’ve had good conference experiences in the past, but Computers & Writing blew them all out of the water. Granted I’m easily starstruck, but this conference facilitated professional relationships, and everyone was so accepting, welcoming, and critiques occurred with warmth. I met Gail Hawisher. Cindy Selfe(!) asked me about my research (and remembered it and me later on). I spent some time being mentored by Michael Day. I wasn’t brave enough to talk to Katherine Hayles, but I did (accidentally) get into a debate with Tim Wu in a Q&A session and while I might have later psyched myself out, in the moment, I wasn’t that intimidated by these “greats.” I’ve made so many IRL and Twitter friends here and exchanged research and advice with so many people with backgrounds as diverse as mine, if not more so. I saw and loved Dan Anderson’s work. I saw a lot that moved me with regards to pedagogy and my own personal way of being in the world.
In short: C&W is love and has become my new home-base conference.
Access copy of my talk below.
“I Think Writing Is a Pretty Cool Guy. Eh Makes Meaning and Doesn’t Afraid of Anything”: Grammatical Memes and Linguistic Practice on 4chan
Vyshali Manivannan, Montclair State University
Computers & Writing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
May 1, 2011
[T→1] On December 2, 2007, an Anonymous user on 4chan’s Random – /b/ board praised Halo’sprotagonist. His post (gesture) contained erroneous metonymy, capitalization, punctuation, verb inconsistency, and letter transposition. OP [1.1] instantly posted an intended correction that replicated the errors and then acknowledged in conventional 4chan parlance, called chanspeak, that this mistake merited suicide [1.2]. /b/tards, the denizens of /b/, immediately policed OP’s solecisms by posting derivatives of “pretty cool guy” across 4chan, ostensibly to warn against egregious mistakes. However, many of these derivatives were [2] praised for their cleverness; only deviations from OP’s formula met with ostracizing derision [3]. /b/, through extensive community participation, transformed “pretty cool guy” from a grammatical train wreck to an exploitable, adaptable template sanctioning the very solecisms that initially incited contempt [4].
On a board popularly described as (quote) “brain-melting,” the syntactic awareness required to adapt grammatical memes is especially noteworthy. In most electronic media, particularly those with a rapid rate of interaction, errors of mechanical failure are typical and generally tolerated. 4chan’s adoption of solecisms signals its refusal to forgive these mechanical failure errors, despite the fact that interactions on /b/ transpire in seconds. As “pretty cool guy” illustrates, typos and the inability to parse and replicate memetic grammar provoke proscriptive, ostracizing verbal attacks [5]. Far from being grammatically ignorant, /b/tards recognize solecisms, unite to police them, and purposely incorporate them into chanspeak, suggesting that incorrect grammar is inexcusable in all contexts.
I will focus on what I am calling “lulz linguistics,” which consists of the solecisms, euphemisms and dysphemisms, idioms, and orthographic play that emerge from trolling. I will also discuss select grammatical memes that exemplify community establishment, trolling, and linguistic evolution unique to /b/.
[6] 4chan is the largest Western image board on the Internet and is purely anonymous; users are automatically assigned the username “Anonymous,” informally shortened to “Anon.” Sub-boards [7] are designated by a letter within backslashes, as in /b/, a convention that engenders orthographic play [8]. Typical posts consist of an image and text comment [9]. The site lacks any data retention mechanisms, so that threads with the most user participation are those with the highest longevity and visibility. Threads lacking in interesting content disappear rapidly. Correspondingly, 4chan’s memory is literally that of its diverse, antagonistic, and stereotypically contrary [10] population.
Characterized by its lack of rulesand infamously termed “hackers on steroids” by Fox News [11], /b/tards interact by trying to (quote) “shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other” [12]. /b/’s participatory dynamic hinges on trolling, or disrupting others’ emotional equilibrium by exploiting their insecurities. If you are (quote) “dumb enough to rise to the bait,” you need to [12.1] GTFOthe Internet. [13] /b/ has targeted websites, individuals, and political entities perceived as (quote) “full of it,” stupid, overly sensitive, or unjust. The goal is for everyone to (quote) “get over it” instead of retaliating against a stranger’s idiocy or self-importance [14]. Thus, refusing to respond or responding indifferently [14.1] is the most effective way to end trolling. [15] Trolling interactions emulate psychological warfare, as the “Internet hate machine” [16] is powered by contempt toward everyone else on the web and the gleefully vicious rationale of (quote) “doing it for the lulz,” the pleasure derived from others’ misfortune. Lulz linguistics, then, concerns the manipulation of invective and defensive language, or “flaming,” as well as any resulting “lulzy” solecisms.
The relationship between the competitively clever posting inherent to trolling and chanspeak evolution coincides with Darwinian theory of cultural evolution and Susan Blackmore’s criteria regarding memetic transmission. To achieve meme status—and therefore become an accepted linguistic practice rooted in /b/’s collective cultural memory—a given practice must be replicated with [17] high fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Thus, on 4chan, which lacks an archive, the more an expression is reposted [18], the more visible it is to users.
Because of 4chan’s fluctuating and capricious user base, the survival of one linguistic practice over another is solely contingent on chance. As such, the meme must be inherently engaging, as opposed to “forced memes,” or solely fecund memes, which incite resentment. /b/’s memory rejects these memes, such as the attempted neologism “EPIN” [19]—a compound of “epic” and “win”—despite high-volume spamming. By contrast, the intellectual satisfaction derived from discovering and perpetuating lulz renders lulz linguistics a lasting subset of chanspeak. /b/tards (quote) “demonstrate a penchant for wordplay [20] and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language,” and consider slang formation and use a game, reflected in their trolling [21]. Chanspeak allows for the free invention of low-fidelity orthographic and eye dialect forms, where non-standard spellings signify dialectal speech. Furthermore, to compensate for the lack of a data archive, chanspeak encourages high-fidelity replications of memes that document /b/’s history. By doing so, lulz linguistics links the community-defining practice of trolling with language play as a historicizing and policing process [22].
“Pretty cool guy” belongs to a category of chanspeak that comprises errors of mechanical failure or ignorance as well as eye dialect phonetic respellings. Mechanical failure errors serve a policing function, as seen in “pretty cool guy,” and as a litmus test for communal inclusion and solidarity. This is also seen in the meme “Your a fucking idiot” [23], where the formula is “Your a X,” incorrectly using the second-person possessive pronoun. As a flame tactic, the flagrant grammatical error aims to identify new or casual users, termed “newfags,” and to infuriate others by demeaning their intelligence in the voice of an unintelligent user. This memetic grammar plays on others’ relative sense of superiority at recognizing a common solecism. However, users who correct itreveal themselves as newfags with an inflated sense of self-importance, thus inviting trolling.
The policing function of chanspeak’s eye dialect operates similarly in that accepted letter substitutions and transpositions are fixed; altering them is (quote) “doing it wrong.” Letter or symbol substitution often derives from typographical errors that occurred so frequently they became convention. For instance, “plox” [24] likely originated as the phonetic spelling of “plx,” a typo of “plz,” short for “please,” and connotes insistent urgency, probably because of its frequent usage in pornography threads. [25] Lolcat transpositions and phonetic respellings are also frequent occurrences on /b/ and denote cuteness, innocence, and sometimes incongruous politeness. Switching the order of vowels, however, “doing it wrong” and often results in flaming.
Words may also be respelled as the combination of two words to compensate for the lack of spoken intonation. For instance, “m-o-a-r” combines “more” and “roar” to connote insistence; the compound “lolwut” [26] joins the abbreviation for hilarity with the eye dialect “w-u-t,” were the respelling indicates utter bafflement, often in reference to a bizarre statement or image. “W-a-t do,” originating on /b/, draws on similar connotations and illustrates the fact that (quote) “it is considered anti-lulz to write anything more than a two to three word combination of abbreviations and slang.” Exceeding these parameters may also invite flaming. For instance, lolwut should be written as one word and must be unpunctuated, and “what”-derivatives should never be spelled correctly.
By adopting common errors of mechanical failure and ascribing new connotations to them, chanspeak disapproves of typos but integrates mistakes to compensate for the attrition of meaning via a computer interface. By forcing users to approach language differently, chanspeak’s orthographic experimentation stimulates our pattern recognition neural network, resulting in a language system that is more intellectually stimulating and engaging than formal English.
Pattern play is literally incorporated into chanspeak in community-defining procedures such as “newfags can’t triforce” [27]. The convention is as follows: OP begins a thread with this sentence and the corresponding Unicode symbol arrangement. However, the text cannot simply be copied and pasted; doing so results in an incorrectly formatted triforce. Users who don’t manually enter the symbols are thus revealed as outsiders and flamed as newfags. Likewise, 4chan’s green-text code—used to quote and acknowledge assumptions in other Anons’ posts—identifies casual users who don’t know that the greater-than symbol results in green text or that the convention connotes sarcasm in signaling assumptions [28]. For example, in this thread where the OP offered a paying job to Anon, one Anon sarcastically notes all the logical fallacies in OP’s post. Failure to perceive sarcasm in green-text when “implying” is omitted, as in the “m-f-w / my face when” comment, is singular newfag behavior.
By contrast, /b/tards possess inventive freedom in symbol substitutions. The use of ampersand in “b&” and “party v&” [29] intimate irreverence at being banned from 4chan and being arrested by the FBI, respectively. Phonetic substitutions similarly poke fun at notions of patriotism, as in Americunts and Murrica [29.1], where the misspellings seem denigrating but were proudly utilized by self-identified American /b/tards in the thread commemorating Osama bin Laden’s death. Orthographic play is also evident in community nicknames; in addition to “/b/tard,” [30] /b/ users have identified as “/b/oys,” “/b/ros,” or “/b/ronies.” Orthographic experimentation has also been used in individual usernames, as opposed to choosing a specific name [31], seen here in Rollybro Anon’s “handle” modification.
Orthographic play is also used to commemorate trolling exploits, as in “/b/lackup” [32] and “/b/lockade” which reference the 2006 joint raid on the virtual Habbo Hotel. During the raid, /b/tards and other trolls flooded the site with black male avatars, and the orthographic deviation still appears in call-to-arms posts for unrelated raids. Other commemorative orthographic deviations, such as the wordplay “/b/-day”—on which moderators enforced rules and /b/tards revolted—further suggest that lulz linguistics comprises a historical tradition in lieu of an archive.
One such chanspeak neologism is “an hero” [33], taken from a solecism on the MySpace memorial of Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader who killed himself. A /b/tard discovered the page and the erroneous article usage, and from visitors’ comments assumed that Henderson had shot himself over a lost iPod. [34] The page was posted to /b/, and the memorial and Henderson’s family were spammed with “an hero” posts and iPod images until “an hero,” due to its lulziness, entered chanspeak meaning a suicide victim who has been irrationally honored. The lulz of Henderson’s death lies primarily in his heroism for suiciding over an iPod, compounded by the obvious indefinite article error, repeated three times in the memorial post. /b/ even neologized “an villain,” the individual responsible for an hero’s suicide and “an sidekick,” an individual who helps the an hero become an hero. As more people were classified as an heroes, the phrase evolved to mean “removal of oneself from the gene pool to the benefit of others,” and has become a popular response in advice threads on /b/ [35].
The lexical addition of “an hero” not only commemorates the raid that followed its discovery but also indicates that chanspeak evolves based on active engagement across the Internet. Significantly, several euphemisms and idioms are assimilated from other websites, meaning that errors of mechanical failure are even less forgivable outside of 4chan. The fact that /b/tards are actively noting lulz linguistics across the web further attests to the intellectual satisfaction offered by chanspeak, as users actively build, borrow, and adapt the language to heighten their sense of superiority and cleverness and earn praise from other users.
Chanspeak is also notorious for its use of bigoted slurs to signal communal inclusion. Interestingly enough, the harsher the word, the more inclusive its chanspeak meaning. For instance, the widespread suffixation of “-fag” signifies group status, such as oldfags, pseudonymous namefags, and samefags—those who pretend to post as multiple users. These words function as nouns, adjectives, and verbs, as in “newfags newfagging with their newfaggotry” and “sure is samefag in here” [37]. The suffix is also attached to jobs, majors, hobbies, political affiliations, and games. These uses are almost always self-referential, and also help /b/tards identify each other elsewhere online. The appropriation of “fag” establishes community by ensuring Anon’s immunity to a slur that would offend sensitive or casual users. Likewise, “nigras” [38], which skyrocketed in popularity due to the Habbo Hotel raid, connotes solidarity among /b/tards by referencing the avatars used in the /b/lockade. Coopting such slurs as group identifiers exposes users who are insecure enough to be hurt by words, distinguishing them as outsiders.
Finally, it seems appropriate to end with the idiomatic meme [40] “Don’t mess with football,” one of the few rules ever ascribed to /b/. It refers to the arrest of a /b/tard who claimed he would bomb various football stadiums during Ramadan in 2006. The lulz lies in the amusement that anyone would take anything on /b/ seriously [41], and translating this into “Don’t mess with football” only underscores /b/’s irreverence and semantic playfulness. Accordingly, then, neither the Internet nor linguistic interaction seems to be serious business. However, at the same time, solecisms are derided unless—or until—they become memes. This suggests that online, grammatical correctness is serious business, albeit more flexible than standard English. The comprehension chanspeak requires reveals a population cognizant of the link between semantic meaning and orthography, as well as the understanding of how to use solecisms to compensate for the limitations of electronic interfaces. Ultimately, linguistic evolution on 4chan is a process of discovering, policing, and exploiting solecisms to complicate semantic meaning, encourage participation, preserve history, and denote the importance of grammatically correct language even while ostensibly devolving it.
