my-singing-soul:
why is it that all the most popular posts on tumblr
are written like this
with no capitals
and no punctuation
i just really want there to be a popular and grammatically correct post on tumblr
I think the majority of Tumblr’s dialect (is there a word for a written dialect? Hardly anyone speaks Tumblr.) comes from influence within the tag system.
My theory is that the lack of capitalization is stylized, ironic laziness (same reason as the increasingly popular use of abbreviations such as idek and ikr, and particles like desu), whereas the punctuation stems from the tag system, where commas split up tags. So, “this is like, so totally cool” would be tagged “this is like” “so totally cool.”
With commas struck from the tumblr blogger’s arsenal, they rely on run-on sentences and other means to show emphasis. One such means, spacing, is another quirk influenced by the tags. If you repeat a tag, it will only show once, which is why you get “really r e a l l y weird things like this.”
Also common on Tumblr are people who show their enthusiasm through their text by pretending their haNDS ARE FRKEAKIGN OUT AN D THEY CANT TPYE OMFGGGG. This adaptation is actually pretty cool, I think, as it serves to communicate tone across a very toneless medium.
Did you hear that noise? That was the sound of my desk breaking. My linguistics boner just snapped it in half.
