On the other hand, there are many ways that Live does convey the writer’s emotion, or at least its intensity. A key one is reduplication. Abbreviations such as wtf can be made emphatic by repeating the last letter – wtffffff – which doesn’t represent speech in any literal sense; lol (“laughing out loud,” usually not corresponding to actual laughing out loud by the writer) becomes lololol, entirely divorced from the speech sound it represents. Even when Live represents a speech effect, it can be divorced from literal representation of the sound; while we might say a drawn-out “niiiiice” for effect, in Live you’re likely to see it written niceeee.

Evolution or de-evolution?

Live is like a sci-fi story where people’s tongues and vocal cords have been replaced by keyboards and screens, and they have to learn to work with the potentials and constraints of their new anatomy. You don’t have volume, pitch, rhythm or speed, so what do you do? Skip using the Shift key and punctuation to show haste (sorry cant chat rn got an essay due) or casualness (hi whats up). Make a typographical error to show urgency or heedlessness – teh (for the), pwn (for own, as in dominate or defeat), zomg (for OMG because Z is next to Shift), and hodl (for hold in online currency trading); these all originated with errors but became fixed forms that are simultaneously more intense and more facetious than the originals. Slip your finger off the shift key when typing multiple exclamation points to look even more unhinged: !!!!1111. And then play with that sarcastically to make !!!!!111one. Shred capitalisation standards to convey derision: if someone writes “Sorry, I don’t want to talk about this,” you can mock them by writing, “sOrRy i dOnT WaNt tO tAlK aBouT ThiS.” It’s speech, but not as we know it.