Do you speak tech?
“Just google it.”
“He texted me yesterday.”
“He liked my Facebook status.”
“Did you read my tweet?”
Our language is infused with technological influence. Consider this sentence:
“He liked my status.”
Ten years ago this would have been a weird sentence, implying that a man appreciated the speaker’s marital status perhaps? But today, we understand this to mean that a man clicked the “like” button underneath the speaker’s post on Facebook.
Speaking of Facebook, at this year’s f8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg discussed updates that will affect the language of Facebook:
“When we started, the vocabulary was really limited. You could only express a small number of things, like who you were friends with. Then last year, when we introduced the Open Graph, we added nouns, so you could like anything that you wanted. This year, we’re adding verbs. We’re going to make it so you can connect to anything in any way you want. It is all part of building this language for how people connect.”
Check out this fascinating article that examines the effect this change will have on the way we speak. You can also watch Zuckerberg’s entire keynote speech here.
What do you think of Facebook’s impact on language? Do you have examples of technology’s influence on vernacular?
