More thoughts on language

[pat]

I her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss discusses, mostly despairingly, the impact of electronic communication on punctuation. (She does not like emoticons, oh no she doesn't, my precioussss....) She talks about the use of asterisks (and bracketing underlines) for emphasis, but ignores what is to me the most interesting electronic punctuation: the "movement" asterisk.

You've seen them -- the single or double asterisks denoting physical action: **shudder**, *grin*, *walks away humming tunelessly*, that sort of thing. (I have also seen -- and used -- multiple colons for the same effect: :::looks around nervously:::. (And let's not even get into () or {} for hugs, shall we?)) I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with them; I use them myself.

But I think it sheds a fascinating light on the nature of electronic communication. Truss cites linguists who talk of email and netspeak as being a hybrid of written and spoken language. And I think that's true, but it also strikes me as something more subtle: perhaps we are stage-managing our communications with others.

The movement asterisks seem to me as being equivalent to stage directions in plays, except that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. What is the difference between *gasps in horror* and [GASPS IN HORROR] ? Nothing much, except that one describes an action that has taken (or is taking) place, while the second indicates an action that should take place. Emoticons function similarly.

Or maybe it is not like stage directions at all; maybe it is more closely related to close-captioning of television programs. In either case, is there some sort of philosophical issue here? Do we somehow subconsciously see our lives as entertainment programs, with ourselves as the stars? If so, how does that impact what we want from/seek out in/think about the world? Does it make us more drama-prone in our communication or in life generally?

Probably, it is something much simpler. After all, I can't conceive of sending a three sentence personal letter. (Business letters are another matter entirely.) But I often send emails with only a few sentences -- sometimes only one. Irony and sarcasm usually take more than a few words to develop properly in a written medium; perhaps emoticons et al. help overcome the lack of verbiage.

(There is another netspeak punctuation that I find interesting: the use or "< >" and "</>" to indicate irony or sarcasm or the like. I'm still trying to make some philosophical sense of it.)

I think differences in fora are also interesting. I do not have a lot of experience with Usenets boards, but a cursory examination of the one I do frequent shows (among posts by regulars, at least) a near absence of emoticons or movement asterisks. It has always struck me as more "formal" than LJ. And again, context matters a great deal: a thread of people discussing a social event is much more likely to have emoticons than one discussing, to take a recent example, the ways in which Usenet communications are impacted by LJ.

I know I am not covering new ground with this. I'm sure many a Ph.D. in linguistics has worked on this, or similar issues, for their dissertation. But it's still interesting to to me.

[Edit: on further reflection, this post strikes me as, ahem, pretentious. (No, moi pretentious? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!) But I still think it would be interesting to discuss electronic punctuation and the way it arises out of the nature of the medium.]

Comments

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

First, anyone interested in this topic of conversation might also be interested in q_pheevr's journal.

I've noticed that I do the movement asterisks most often in IMs with sweeties or close friends. Sometimes I need to convey that I'm crying or that the topic is really emotionally charged for me. I probably am not having interactions that are that intimate on LJ, or where I am that worried about being misunderstood. But I have found that I do need to notify someone of the "would comfort me if we were in person and they could read my body language or see the puddles in the corner of my eye" if I want to have the best-possible-response to my communications.

I also tend to send hugs, snuggles, and pats on the back in IMs and emails.

I'm learning to use * rather than (, in order to accomodate my friends with Trillian. I used to use ::: back when I was on IRC. And will sometimes use /snarkiness or /soapbox.

I am really, really glad that *yay* I have someone to discuss this book and the questions it raises.

(my biggest learning from the book: I want to use punctuation marks outside of quotation marks in the British way. I'm glad to know where this tendency towards incorrect grammar came from-- reading too many non-American books).

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

IMs seem to me to be completely equivalent to spoken language: they have an immediate back and forth quality that speech has. So emoticons and asterisks make sense in that context to me. But LJ and other sorts of non-immediate communication are neither fish not fowl, which is what makes me think of stage directions.

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

I think you've captured a distinction there that I hadn't recognized.

I also think that when the typing is more "real time", not only do certain expectations about proofreading or spell-checking not apply, but there may be some value on immediacy. So we get IMs with content like "???" or "WTF?" or even "(confused look)".

I am thinking of a IM exchange that I had with someone I have flirted with: I happened to mention that most of my relationships have been with people born in [year]. Zie did replied along the lines of "*taking out wallet and looking at driver's license* hmmm, I was born in [year]." Now, I know he wasn't actually needing to look at his driver's license to know his DOB, but it served a good dramatic purpose to write it that way. Stage directions, exactly. Magnifying the humor in his comment (humor definitely is a plus in flirting with me).

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

Grammar is only correct or incorrect in context. Having worked in the publications field at a US University for some time, and having done so in fairly divergent fields (Molecular Biology and Education, for instance), I learned that "correct" depends on which style manual I am consulting, which depends on which journal we're submitting to, which depends on the whims of the publisher of the journal as much as his or her country of origin and the country in which the journal is published. I always thought that reversing the punctuation was silly (e.g., putting the comma inside of the quotation marks, whether or not it makes any sense), but it's how the APA (American Psychological Association) does it, and since APA is one of THE biggest standards in the publication industry in this country, that's what most people have to learn to do. I TRY to be consistent one way or the other in any given post, but I only put so much effort into this on-line, where the volume of words I am typing is sufficiently high as to render it impossible to proof-read to the standards I would on the job, for instance.

FYI, "(movement)" on Trillian will often result in interesting emoticons. So (wave) will come out as a little waving hand, whereas *wave* will stay in text form. Do you see the little squirrel icon when I send you (squirrel) in IM?

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

I've never seen (squirrel) or a squirrel icon.

I had never thought about different fields using different style guides, despite having had to do both APA and Chicago at different times.

I noticed some interesting things when I had to do transcription from tapes done by a Canadian. He has stopped saying calling "(" a bracket and "." a full stop, but still says expiry and a few other non-standard U.S. English terms.

I have a friend-and-former-lover who lived in England and Scotland, and worked as a translator for the U.N. in the states. I think she wrote her thesis on a British novellist. She retains consistent British usage.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I come from a background of things like muds and mushes and such where the lack of body language/vocal tone cues inherent in written language is noticed and highlighted and, since it /is/ a written form of communication, we can, as the snail there says, at least convey a modicum of insight into the body language/vocal tone cues we'd be sending were we in person.

That was a long sentence.

(I don't remember the stat, but after all, some big ol' portion of in-person communication is based on tone of voice and body language.)

Anyway, so I do use the asterisked "stage directions" at times, on LJ and on BBSes, to help indicate somewhat what I'd be doing were we all in the same room together.

I do find that I use(d) fewer of these sorts of cues on Usenet, mostly because I'm not really trying to convey what /I'm/ doing, just what I'm talking about.

But I don't think of them as stage directions; I think of them as an admittedly insufficient attempt to bring as many different types of communication and communicational nuances onto the 'net as possible. (This vaguely ties into building communities on the 'net, too.)

And yes, there are theses and articles aplenty about this.

[elissaann.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether it's possible to make philosphical sense of using fake HTML for irony, sarcasm, etc. To me, it's an ironic use of HTML tags. Which is not a tautology but a further irony. Or something.

And for the record, I hate "smilies" (but love smiles).

Clarification

[daltong.livejournal.com]

Pat, I apologize if this is patronizing and you already know this, but I got the impression that you didn't realize that <> and </> are HTML tags. So that's what elissaann is talking about here.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

(There is another netspeak punctuation that I find interesting: the use or "< >" and "</>" to indicate irony or sarcasm or the like. I'm still trying to make some philosophical sense of it.)

That's from HTML. Personally, I like it - it allows me to indicate exactly *where* I'm intending to be sarcastic/ironic/silly.

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Just to illuminate the HTML philosophy further. It was not originally intended that HTML be just a page layout format. There used be tags called EM(phasize) and STRONG which browsers were invited to interpret as italics and bold, but that would make sense if you were a speech synthesizer reading an HTML document to a blind person. Then you would, perhaps, interpret EM as higher pitch and STRONG as louder. Eventually, I guess people realized that HTML wasn't going to be used for anything other than web browsers, but XML is bringing back that concept of separating the content from the way in which the content is to be presented. So that's the spirit in which I embed non-standard HTML tags in my online writings, although LJ tends to eat them if you aren't cautious.

The other example, which I do in Trillian before realizing that it isn't supported, is "/em wonders how it got so late" expecting it to display "king_tirian wonders how it got so late" in a system color instead of a message color. I picked that up from Everquest, where some emotions like /laugh and /bow were accompanied by your graphical avatar displaying your action.

I am personally amused by my emoticon evolution. I started out with :-) in old Usenet in college, then moved over to the < g > (without the spaces) of Compuserve, then back to :-) when I had a real ISP, and now I'm more likely to go with ^_^ or O.o like the youth of today do.