If Twitter is useful for anything beyond a flamethrower of breaking word and URL typographical error , it ’s squeeze us to be considerate about spoken language — we have to use blank space wisely . Unfortunately , the hashtag is ruining talking . # NotGonnaLie
This modern function of hashtags was pioneered several year ago by one dude : Chris Messina , a Google employee . Messina think the quondam pound symbol — hitherto untapped online — could be a ripe way to “ tag ” tweets , bestow orderliness to the enormous gas swarm of noise that is 99 % of all Twitter military action . That function works — we could look for # fukushima or # tahrirsquare this past year and yield news .
This origin does n’t matter anymore . Hashtags at their unspoilt base in as what linguist call “ paralanguage , ” like articulatio humeri shrug and modulation . That ’s all right . But at their most plaguey , the colloquial hashtag has burst out of its use as a sorting cock and become a lingual tumour — a tic more irritating than any shopworn connectedness or slothful image meme . The hashtag is conceptually out of bounds , being used by figurer conformists without convention , sensation , or intelligence , a like yknowwwww that now permeate the cyberspace outside of the tweet it was meant to corral . It pervades Facebook , texting , Foursquare — turning into a form of “ ironic metadata , ” as linguistBen Zimmerof The Visual Thesaurus labels it .
But why the need for metadata when regular words have been bring so well ? When the New York Timesdecidedto acknowledge the hashtag this summer ( ! ) it quote Messina with a line of reasoning that ought to be evidence enough to indict the # :
“ You kind of have to be in - the - know , ” Mr. Messina say . “ So it ’s one of those joke where you ’re like , ‘ Oh , I see what you did there , because you ’re on Twitter and I ’m on Twitter . ’ “
This cause sense to Zimmer : “ [ hashtags ] show that you ’re part of a residential district that portion out these convening , to show that you ’re playing the plot . ” Beyond fashionable crutch , the hashtag makes people feel part of something . But we do n’t need more inside joke , civilisation cliques , or frivolous gestures . tally a hashtag does n’t make you “ in the know , ” because there ’s nothing to know — most of the time I do n’t see what you did there , because you did n’t do anything there . Like adding a rimshot to your own trick , we now stick hashtags in our digital statements because we think that might validate them as part of this raw , mangled sentence structure .
Take # winning . What does it mean ? Charlie Sheen ’s sagging , animated corpse of a career talk through his coke - nozzle and spoke to us . It wanted to proclaim that he was doin’ just fine . # acquire . It remove off as the lowbrow badge of option across Twitterdom , signify winner without read it . You could say the saddest heap of doodly-squat , bring # winning , and that seven letter thumbs up would make it OK .
Just drop my girl off at GameStop she s gon na bey me Call of Duty cause were both mellow LOL # winning
The hashtag is a plebeian crutch , a lazy compass for substance in the personal nothingness — written clipart .
Some illustration of the Accessory Hashtag I ’ve found on Facebook , where the microbe has spread out quickly :
Why did n’t they just express the things they hashtagged ?
In all of these instance , the hashtag is nothing more than an emoticon of form , saysUC Berkeley Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg . And this explicit See what I did here ? hashtag purpose is homely “ unintelligent , ” Nunberg lament , because any vestige of satire is neutralized once you channelise to it with a big honking # . Why write something excitedly when you’re able to lazily throw in # excited ? Why not just say “ I miss you ” instead of # missingyou ? Why put a judgment of conviction through this kaleidoscope of formatting horse son of a bitch instead of just enounce something ? Say anything . The streak is set so head - imploding - ly low — just write a statement that does n’t require me to retroactively use a hashtag to get the heart of what you ’re say . Once the hashtag has been applied so sloppily , pop as a form of interesting metacommentary , “ it ’s not doing what it ’s meant to , ” state Nunberg . It ’s broken and gratuitous .
The bad newsworthiness is , we should n’t require hashtagification to go anywhere . “ That it ’s pervert , ” says Nunberg , “ comes with the territory . ” Nunberg and Zimmer agree that the hashtag has voltage as an exciting new form of originative expression and irony — everyone ’s laughed at # whitegirlproblems at least once . And I ’m inclined to consort . And like everything else on the internet , once it ’s kinda popular , it ’s really popular , and there ’s nothing we can do about it . “ [ It ] can be teasing , sure , ” agrees Zimmer , “ to see hoi polloi hashtagging in inappropriate places or create arbitrary new ones where it does n’t seem necessary . But that just indicates that the hashtag cultivation has really taken off . ” Language is unstable , specially on-line , and that ’s something to be eager about — unless it ’s dragging our tongues down . I go for only that the rage part of the fervor will flame out quickly , yielding a truly radical new manner of speaking online . In the meantime , we ’re all a bit obtuse and a lot more broken . # FML
Photo courtesy ofJackie Lampungnano
Update : Eminent linguist and one of the smashing mind of our meter , Noam Chomsky , wrote to me with his thoughts on the affair :
“ Do n’t use Twitter , almost never see it . ”
There you have it .
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