Gifs as Language - Speaker Deck

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GIFS AS LANGUAGE ABE STANWAY

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First things ﬁrst.

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gif /ˈdʒɪf/ Noun Not fucking pronounced ‘gif’. See also: giraffe, gin, giant, gerbil, geology

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Let’s talk Chaucer.

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1343 - 1400

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He wrote the Canterbury Tales.

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Canonical example of Middle English literature.

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Also completely impenetrable.

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“I wol nat letten eek noon of this route, Lat every felawe telle his tale aboute And lat se now who shal the soper wynne And ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne.”

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Middle English was spoken, not written.

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Let’s talk Shakespeare.

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Let’s talk Shakespeare.

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Lived from 1564 to 1616.

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Not impenetrable!

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“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suﬀer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles...”

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1600 1400 ? --------- ---------

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1600 1400

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Printing press catapulted into widespread use around 1500.

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English started CHANGING

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Blackletter was let go

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Standard spellings brought in.

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The semicolon was invented. (1494)

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More words.

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STREAMLINED COMMUNICATION

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Fast forward ﬁve hundred years.

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COMMUNICATION, ART The book as not as It’s 1985...

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...and written media hasn’t really changed.

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English hasn’t really changed either.

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Thirty years later...

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An explosion of new written media!

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emails, forums, text messages, tweets, status updates, yahoo answers, gchats, DMs, youtube comments, hovertext-a-la-xkcd, reddit threads, blog posts, listservs, inline code comments, jira tickets, white house petitions, ios notiﬁcations, stupid startup about pages, facebook groups, pastebins,

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English is CHANGING

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English is CHANGING

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It’s streamlining itself again.

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New words. (the smallest semantically meaningful grammatical unit. retains meaning in isolation.)

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sms-speak, memes, smiley faces, emoji, gifs a word.

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New morphemes. (the smallest grammatical unit, period. may or may not be used in isolation.)

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un · break · able signiﬁes "not" root signiﬁes “can be done”

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# · yolo signiﬁes...something. not really sure how to articulate it. pretty nuanced. some kind of "meta-irony" with a dose of contextual satyr chorus, if i had to guess. root. signiﬁes douchebaggery.

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Likes and favorites are morphemes too.

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New, independent grammars.

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New, independent grammars. don’t like your own facebook post captain picard must say, “why the fuck,” not “what the fuck.” lol is never spelled uppercase hashtags are only appropriate in levity, unless they are meant to signify inclusion in a broader trend. the “me gusta” rageface signiﬁes a speciﬁc type of shameless satisfaction. conspiracy keanu must ask, “what if” full sentences are appropriate in text messages a gif response generally contains a degree of snark

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A new, eﬃcient literacy.

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Anyway, this is my point:

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Written language is like a goldﬁsh.

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It grows (and shrinks) to ﬁll its container.

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With so many diﬀerent containers for the written word...

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...and with the velocity that humans are communicating between each other...

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...the language is metastasizing...

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...developing new, eﬃcient linguistic tools that allow it to ﬁt into smaller and smaller spaces...

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...in order to enhance the frictionless transfer of information.

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It will continue to do so as long as we shove it into ever-shifting media.

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Thanks!

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Sources: Marotti, Anthony. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 284 bit.ly/128FI6s Pitcher, Lindsay, Cerasano. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, p. 100 bit.ly/13hXWBW Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, p. 30 bit.ly/17Zz86o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press