the liar's language

on arguing over words on the internet

The decade-wide gap between my brother and I gives me carte blanche to slip into abject immaturity around him. We access a refreshing lack of inhibition when we joke with each other and, on the other side of this playfulness, is the odd stumble into profundity.

The other day—between my stereotypical terrorisms of tinkering with his bedroom light-switch and giving him a low-five so hard both of our fingers stung—I blurted out, English is a liar’s language. You know how I know?

He looked at me blankly so I continued: when I was learning the alphabet and the letter “V” was directly followed by the letter “W” but the “W” looked like two “V’s” and not two “U’s” — I asked, ‘why is it called “double U” and not “double V”?’ and nobody gave me an answer so I just said to myself, ‘okay, this is a language of liars.’

Without skipping a beat my brother replied, you know in Spanish they call it “uve doble?” He unsheathed his phone to look up why its called “double U” in English. Looks like its from Ye Olde English, bro. “W” was a combination of two “U’s” to make a “wuh” sound.

Wow, that’s crazy, I said as I threw a stray sock in his direction and yelled “catch!” to make sure his reflexes were sharp. English is really just three languages in a trench-coat and all of them are lying to each other.

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I’ve had a lot of conversations about language recently. One of my Substack notes about the cultural colonisation of the word “woke” gained traction and hostility mounted in the comments. The good-faith engagements were refreshing but paled in frequency to the derisive snorts at my language choices, disingenuous devil’s advocacies and offensive rebuttals so poorly conceived they deserved only to be dispatched by memes.

At the same time—I stumbled across a Substack note about essays “written in lowercase with poor paragraphing”. As a recovering lower-case essayist, I wanted to provide a sympathetic defence to “lowercasification”. I know what its like to be challenged on the internet so I tried to address the original author’s sentiments kindly and we had a brief but amicable back and forth.

(Note: rather than producing a biased recollection of events—I encourage you to explore the hyperlinks for a fuller picture of how these interactions went.)

In the succeeding altercations I noticed a common texture; a socio-emotional similarity I found curious. There are levels of abstraction I’m drawn to excavating: The thing beneath the thing. English is filled with “underneaths” and I was confronted with how deeply the logics of colonialism and conservatism are embedded in what seem to be everyday attitudes.

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woke — the colonial undercurrent

Common rebuttals to my claim that “woke” has been culturally colonised can be distilled into two prongs: “words can’t be owned” and “that's just how language evolves.”

I get them on an epidermal level though DC Reade presented a more incisive encapsulation of both sentiments, “language term usage mutates in ways that no one can effectively police.”

I can’t do anything about who uses the word “woke”—how its been subsumed, what its evolved into or how it will evolve further. Words transmit so easily that its scary to think how its impossible for us to do anything about any word the dominant culture overhears from Black people and wishes to co-opt (something I predict will proliferate as the boundaries between the Black community and the dominant culture continue to erode from the digital melting pot of social media, physical gentrification and other compounding factors.)

I can, however, point out the thing beneath the thing in the sentiments of “words can’t be owned” and “that’s just how language evolves,” which share a subtle concealment of white supremacy’s self-sustaining rationale of entitlement.

On the matter of language’s evolution: the racist enforcement by the dominant culture means Black communities have boundaried and been boundaried, adapting over and over again—artistically, linguistically, financially and spiritually—to impositions of insulation to make them ours. When we are told, “you have to stay over there” we imbue the “over there” with our very being. Historically, this has meant white people do not make genuine or concerted efforts to engage with Black people or Black culture beyond exploitation, fetishisation, ridicule or general sensationalism. If they did, they’d know that their misuse our words is generally an eye-rolling annoyance or grounds for clowning.

The white extraction of “woke”, which was used in a very specific way within the Black community, is an unnatural evolutionary event in the dominant culture’s language that began when white LGBTQ+ leftists began appropriating the word and metastasising its new meaning via tiktokification—a conception that fundamentally required white people to breach Black neighbourhoods—environmentally and/or digitally—in order to extract our speech. Typically when Black ways of speaking breach containment, absorption into the dominant culture renders them a trend with a shelf-life. The pejorative use of “woke” however, is unnerving because its co-option by the dominant culture looks like it’ll have a far more long-lasting impact. Claiming “that’s just how language evolves” is reductive and says nothing about the logistics regarding how this particular word—which has had a trajectory unlike any other word in the English language—has specifically evolved.

On the matter of words being “un-ownable”: when you consider the historic and ongoing white supremacist treatment of nonwhite people, things that can’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) be owned have repeatedly entered the metaphysical space of property.

Whiteness erected an economic system where Black people were deemed property and committed genocide against Native Americans to extract land and deem it property. The declaration that there are “no rules of ownership” in relation to words rings hollow when western domination has been violently dependant on manufacturing monetary value from any-and-everything in order to exploit it and/or own it. The very concept of trademarks is one such manufacture, allowing a person or corporation to own a distinctive word, logo, sound, colour, shape or combination of all. Words can literally be owned according to the logics of white supremacist capitalism.

There are too many examples of Black cultural productions that can’t be owned (words and dances spring to mind) which have been routinely extracted by occupants of the dominant culture for monetary gain. Words “can’t be owned” but when Kayla Lewis put out a video inventing the term On Fleek it lead to a cultural phenomenon that white content creators and corporations capitalised from while Lewis receives nothing.

I am not interested citing an extensive inventory of theft. My point is that in a white patriarchal capitalist climate, everything is arranged as a matter of fate so if something can’t be owned philosophically, somehow, Black life still endures a continuum of transactions that arc towards loss regarding the un-ownable thing.

The history of slavery is a history of theft but it is also a history of imposition. It’s a history of having shit imposed on you. And on the most basic level, this imposition is conceptual. In addition stealing your labour, they also say “this is some shit you have to believe in”. Not only some shit you have to believe in but a way of believing. What we’re imposing on you is a modality of belief. The understanding that thought implies the deployment of certain conceptual tools and the belief in the reality of those concepts. And one of those of concepts is property. My problem with the various critiques of appropriation is that they assume the legitimacy of property. And they specifically talk about Black cultural production, Black making and the aesthetic sociality of Blackness—can be understood as property, as something that can be owned. I believe that it is not something that can be owned though it is in-fact something that can be stolen. —Fred Moten

Ultimately, the thing beneath thing here is: “words can’t be owned” is a circuitous justification for “words can be stolen” and once the word is stolen, one can deploy a cloud of real-time cultural amnesia and claim the flimsy self-defence of “that’s just how language evolves” without any critical examination of the circumstances that lead to the evolution.

In the middle of an altercation I was asked, “why should we treat something as sacred just because it doesn’t belong to us?” I entertained the question in good faith despite the fact it encapsulated a pathological lack of empathy that should’ve disqualified it from serious engagement. It was only after

Precious

pointed it out I realised I was being confronted with the logic of colonial expansion. It was so overt and I didn’t even notice. It is that insidious.

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grammar — the conservative undercurrent

Unpopular take: If I see an entire 2,000-word essay written in lowercase with poor paragraphing, I don’t care if it’s gone viral with thousands of likes, I’m not reading past the first sentence.

I’m totally cool if this makes me elitist or boomer or close-minded. Also completely okay knowing I’m excluding myself from supposedly wondrous perspectives.

No essay is good enough to suffer a splitting headache from trying to read it. The Shift key is a marvellous invention. Use it.
— Grace Yeoh

Identifying the undercurrents of the dominant culture’s conservatism in the above author’s opinion on “lowercase writing and poor paragraphing” (and by extension, the institution of grammar) requires referral to elements of the author’s opinion directly. I do so in the literary vein of compassionate critique with no personal ill-will towards the author but as a witness wanting to unearth deeper implications of language:

1. I don’t think an opinion adhering to institutional conventions can be considered an “unpopular take.” Positioning it as unpopular masks a common opinion as marginalised. This type of perception skewing is reminiscent of Christian conservatives claiming God-fearing values are under attack despite Christianity dominating every echelon of American society. Rejecting lowercase formatting is something the entire historical superstructure of written media supports.

2. Considering it is mostly young people who write lowercase essays, the self-admissions of “close-mindness”, “elitism” and “boomerism” is a confessional that operates as a dog-whistle to give a demographic of older (typically white, conservative) people a license to punch down.

3. If essays written in “lowercase with poor paragraphing” are the product of naïveté or inability (ranging from neurodivergence, dyslexia, to any miscellaneous struggle with writing) then this opinion reads as mean. If they are written in lowercase as a stylistic choice then this opinion reads as incurious.

4. Parallels to Christian conservatism continue at the tail-end of the quote. American Evangelists often conflate the right to practise their faith with the right to impose their beliefs onto others (see: abortion rights). The author doesn’t opt for accepting that she isn’t the audience for lowercase essays but instead concludes by scolding the very writers “whose wondrous perspectives she’s excluding herself from” by patronisingly demanding they write to conform to her standards.

When I stumble across takes worded as pointedly as this, I’m always intrigued by what event triggered it. Or perhaps a better inquiry—if the author were to meet a “lowercase essayist” face-to-face, perhaps someone who’s just starting out and trying to find their voice and confidence—would the author speak to the writer this way?

The parasociality of social media is flambéing our sense of bravery. We post to therapeutically vent to nobody in particular but those ventilations typically concern someone specific. Which is valid—everyone deserves an outlet. Until the dopamine rush of a ‘like’ hits. Suddenly, we’re given a Pavlovian reward for spilling our pricklier inside-thoughts about people we won’t (or can’t) speak to directly and slowly, it’s making us all a little meaner in pursuit of virtual validation that encourages us to centre hearts on a screen and not the people behind them.

Foregoing capitalisation makes it easier to wrangle the amorphous blob of thoughts in my mind into words and I discovered imbuing my writing with this raw emotion resonates well. It lead to a brief period where I wrote essays in lowercase. My reasons for stopping had nothing to do with fealty to traditional literary structure, I realised that effective communication in lowercase scripture relies on a delicate set of grammatical, syntactic and aesthetic rules that I’d need to take time to fathom.

Where an essay like ayan artan’s in defense of pretension looks clean, succinct and pleasingly rounded despite its eschewal of capitalisation—mine would appear jumbled and feel frenetic. I had to re-negotiate what looked and felt good to me artistically. By trying my hand at writing lowercase essays, I understood there was an etiquette to executing them well. Such a discovery would’ve never happened if I’d dismissed engaging with them from the first sentence.

Conservatism appears in the undercurrents of grammatical purism by maintaining an unwillingness to explore beyond the established order. A grammatical purist would sooner declare lowercase writing is “rooted in laziness” than acknowledge writing is fundamentally a mode of communication and therefore a petition for reciprocity to inextricably tether the fate of a writer to the reader. If lowercase writing is “lazy” then it is also “lazy” to refuse the call to read it.

Instead of allowing themselves to confront the work in a way that may open up their worldview to a new landscape, grammatical purists are prone to make borderline-offensive mockeries of a stylistic choice they refuse to engage with while simultaneously revealing their inability to grasp the etiquette of the form they’re attempting to ridicule.

I’m not trying to be obtuse, I am not ignorant of why one would want to adhere to grammatical structure. Misplaced, insufficient or incorrect grammar, spelling and punctuation can cause confusion and muddy one’s intentions. The conventional reader has likely had the importance of grammar drummed into them as a child and the weight of its structure is reinforced every time they open a book. In that respect, grammar is no different to any other indoctrinating belief system—the rules themselves are neither bad nor good but considering how they’re enforced punitively is useful and, as with all things bound to white supremacy, this is best exemplified by the treatment of Black linguistics.

When I discovered the author’s take, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d see a white person openly mocking Black dialects. Those invested in grammatical purism have a tendency to disparage Black modalities of speech despite the fact that Black dialects have their own complex, linguistic structures that Black children are able to fathom while white people generally struggle to comprehend:

In the 2005 University of Massachusetts study, groups of black and white children were shown images from Sesame Street. In the crucial picture, a sick Cookie Monster languished in bed without any cookies, while Elmo stood nearby eating a cookie. “Who is eating cookies?” Jackson asked her test subjects, and all of them indicated Elmo. “Who be eating cookies?” Jackson then asked. The white kids replied that it was Elmo, while the black kids pointed to Cookie Monster. After all, it is the existential state of Cookie Monster to “be eating cookies”, while Elmo just happened to be eating a cookie at that moment. Cookie Monster, to those conversant in AAE, be eating cookies, whether he is eating cookies or not. The black kids in Jackson’s experiment picked up on the subtle difference when they were as young as 5 or 6. — Why We Be Loving the “Habitual Be” — Katy Waldman

If I had a quid for all the times white people tried to imitate Black speech by flinging a random “be” in the middle of a sentence, I probably wouldn’t have to spend the sullen corners of my day pondering how I’m going to busk for paid subscribers.

The thing beneath the thing here is: conservatism dictates rules be lauded as enforceable laws and historically, they’ve been used to delegitimise nonwhite dialects and demonise lower class communication. Any dissent is considered a moral failure, leaving little breathing room for the emergence of new practises. With lowercase essays, writers are experimenting how to communicate their ideas. They are still figuring out the kinks, bugs, and style but make no mistake, there is an etiquette materialising that makes some lowercase essays more resonant on this platform than essays written with traditionally grammar—just as there’s a distinct etiquette to African American English, Black British Vernacular and any other Black diasporic dialects that the dominant culture typically disparages.

You can either try to understand them, leave them be, or declare them lower lifeforms and remain ignorant of them. Each of us gets to choose.

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There is something to be said about the politics of announcement. Once we take to the digital podium and declare our thoughts, we open ourselves for public challenge but more importantly, we beckon like minds. Scouring the comments, I noticed how many defenders of grammatical purity felt comfortable saying all kinds of—quite frankly—mean-spirited things about writers they share an environment with. The eschewal of capitalisation and traditional paragraphing was considered:

• “disrespectful to the reader”

• “a narcissistic gesture”

• “ideas that are sloppy at best”

• “tacky and needlessly difficult”

• “lazy thinking”

Conservatism tends to exhibit lower levels of compassion and empathy. The plethora of responses characterising lowercase essayists as faux-creative, undisciplined, pretentious, reactive narcissists who are also lazy and semi-literate feels like an unceremonious parade to demonise people who are just expressing themselves.

If someone is writing lowercase essays out of a naïveté or “inability” then they could probably do with less condescension and more positive reinforcement. If they’re writing lowercase essays out of stylistic choice then, as a reader, either meet them where they’re at or look elsewhere. Every artist has a right—duty even—to present their art however they want to. They do so with the hope their honest self-expressions will resonate with whoever it needs to.

Grammatical purists render the eschewal of grammar as personally afflicting—inducing headaches, exacerbating cognitive load, personally disrespectful and hurting to read—which may be true but obscures the deeper, more simple truth that they just want everyone to conform to the commandments of the status quo.

But the beauty of art is that there is never one way to interpret it. I’m currently re-reading Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood which uses capitalisation conventionally but indulges quite experimental formatting. It is more syntactically confronting than your average short story collection and I am fascinated by it. I can imagine others might not be. Each of us gets to choose.

Reading lowercase essays may present a challenge for people who’ve been conditioned to read conventionally but I fail to see how it warrants such unnecessary levels of contempt. If the objective of communication is to convey a sentiment, pearl-clutching because the first letter of every sentence isn’t a mommy or daddy letter to all the other kiddy letters in a couple of viral essays feels like melodramatic catastrophising. Capital letters don’t exist when we verbally communicate with one another and we tend to understand each other just fine.

i think it’s really interesting that a lot of the comments in agreement with this take are being left by a generation older than mine. the expectation that online communication should be beholden to the “rules” of print is quite a static position, and i think it’s a shame to write off the work of so many great minds because of an unwillingness to adapt and expose yourself to new forms of idea transmission. i’ve personally enjoyed reclaiming capitalization as a tool of emphasis rather than a grammatical rule i’m forced to follow. i find it lends a different flavor to the work, and it’s a decision i make with intention. —

redu

When Tiktok was going through the pageantry of being banned, I wrote “I think a platform mostly populated by young people that has, at least bought them joy and at most been an invaluable instrument of social mobility in a landscape with utterly awful job prospects, being banned by a cabal of out-of-touch politicians who seem to have infinite power to restrict but no power to create jobs or universal basic income or anything positively transformative for society—is, like, a really, really obvious demonstration of contempt for the masses and a clear signal that the political structure of America has no desire to build a hopeful or even functional future for young people.”

Up and down the author’s comment section, there is patronisation, reductive mockery and a general disparaging of creativity revealing a cold reality of living under a conservative, gerontocratic rule. Contempt for youth manifests as a compulsion to police what young people do and our society goes to great lengths to slam a cookie-cutter over young people to stone-bake them into good, obedient adult citizens.

I think it is important, as a civilisation, to know what traditions are functionally useful to carry from the past and what can be considered vestigial. White supremacist conservatism obscures this idea because it wants so badly to retain its ill-gotten gains. Rigidity towards something as arbitrary as written language arrangement is, to me, evidence of an over-investment in an obsolete organ. Young people have picked up on that and are running with it and I’ve made it an unshakable pillar of my belief system to never dismiss the creativity of youth without trying to understand them.

the full picture (beneath the picture)

If English is three languages in a trench-coat and all of them are lying to each other it is interesting to see when the dominant culture takes it seriously and when it choses to let it be.

The birth of SMS texting has left grammar curtailing in our written communication for the last 30 years. Sentiments of professionalism and affection once transmitted in physical letters are now expressed in emails (which, despite their airs of formality, are laden with short-hands and abbreviations) or iMessage/Whatsapp conversations (in almost exclusively informal speech). The institution(s) of print adhere to grammatical traditions and remain largely unchanged but the reading volume of the average person is declining. However, engagement on social media usage—a realm which has become generally indifferent, but definitely non-punitive, about using grammar—continues to climb steadily.

In the face of all these physical and digital changes of the written word—grammar (and the usage of capitalisation specifically) is becoming more obsolete.

The helicopter-parental protection of grammatical structure exhibits a desire to keep language static. But if you want an example of a natural way “language evolves,” you needn’t look further than how technology has been transforming our interpersonal communications in profound ways every day for decades.

By contrast, if I’m to even imply a desire to protect Black dialects from acquisition by a dominant culture that has historically pillaged from Blackness on a metaphysical level, then suddenly “language evolves”.

The liar’s language becomes fluid when it wants to subsume the artefacts of other cultures but rigid when it wants to the maintenance its grammatical law. What is considered policeable and what isn’t conveniently seems to be to the ubiquitous detriment of Blackness.

I hope I’m not being misunderstood, either. The people who were arguing with me about the cultural colonisation of the “woke” aren’t the same people who were disparaging lowercase essayists.

But there is a temperamental nexus.

Conservatism is dispatched as a shield to protect an institutional structure so it can continue to uphold discriminatory metrics of “excellence”, while colonial extraction and apologia is wielded as a sword to enforce the right to subsume Black cultural productions that don’t occur naturally in the white vicinity.

If you look close enough, you can see the conservative hand and colonial hand washing each other. All of it makes for a cleaner appearance of the white supremacist body.