• Naughty,” in Shakespeare’s England, was to be a “naught person” — a soulless, wicked, half-man.
• “Awful” and “awesome” once meant the same. (They both meant “awesome.”)
• To be “generous” once meant to be of noble and pure blood. (Only they could be magnanimous, you see.)

 Language has always changed, but it does so as a slow trawl and rarely ventures far. Semantic shift operates like a tree, growing slowly but resolutely, and it’s only with the time-lapse of retrospection that we can see how far it has come.

But then, at the end of the 20th century, somethi...

The internet makes language change faster because it leads to more weak ties, and you can get to know people who you never would have met otherwise.

With hashtags, viral videos, and “following” strangers, we are constantly rubbing up against people of different linguistic communities. Wher...

• The language we use is determined by "weak tie" relationships, that is, with strangers and interlocutors. For the first time in history, the internet provides an entire world of weak ties. 
• The result is that internet language has evolved in different stages. If you remember MUDs, AI...

The main difference between this generation and the previous is in seeing the internet as a social medium. The Old Internet People mainly kept their social lives offline, but the second wave turned to MSN, AOL/AIM, MySpace, and WeBlog to connect with friends as well as strangers. Slowly, MySpace ...

If you can remember joining social networks when they were still unpopulated, niche, fledgling things, then you likely belong to the above generation. If, though, you joined an already bustling online world of social networks, this is your generation. In this group, there are two noticeable clust...