• greygore@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    How do you think language changes happen? One or more persons decide to write a specific way for one reason or another, and sometimes it catches on and more people start to do it until it’s an accepted form. Every change to language is artificial.

    ee cummings style writing annoys me because the lack of capitalization and punctuation makes things harder to read. I’ll use emojis sometimes because it amuses me to do so but get irritated by the way some people sprinkle them throughout their texts. I loathe when people misuse “literally”, especially when there’s no word (that I’m aware of) that has the original meaning and so using it incorrectly dilutes my use of the word.

    It’s okay to be annoyed by the way some people choose to communicate, especially when it makes their writing more difficult to parse, but the idea of distinguishing “artificial” usage is asinine to me. Whether it’s some hipster who learned about the evolution of language and decided to employ some of those outdated characters, a creative trying to make their writing stand out from others, an AI opponent who is trying to poison training data, or just someone who saw others doing it and decided to copy them, it’s all just as artificial as someone who decided to shorten charisma to rizz, the crazy evolution of “based” into its current form, or any of the other shortcuts and changes people have consciously decided to make.

    Hell, one reason we don’t use those characters any more is because typesetters needed to standardize on a set of characters and chose to drop certain less frequently used ones in order to make their job simpler. That feels much more artificial to me.