JOHNSON reads Reddit from time to time. Reddit, as the web's most prominent meme hatchery, is an incubator of new trends in written language. The Internet has changed so much of our lives, but few things have changed as much as the way we communicate. For the last twenty years, we’ve been interacting in writing in real time, for the first time in our species’s history. It’s fascinating, then, to look at how we’ve attempted to substitute all the nuance of spoken language and gestures with written conventions.

Reddit, of course, ain’t your daddy’s chatroom. Its highest-profile visitors have included Barack Obama (who crashed the website’s servers), severalprominentscientists, and PSY (of “Gangnam Style” fame). It is at its core a shrine to the fun of the Internet, but there are also sections focused on drier matters: world news, anthropology—even linguistics. Reddit is mainly an English-language party, but its popularity also reaches non-English-speakers, who might "lurk" (read, but not write) or attempt to improve their English through participation.

Some of Reddit’s language conventions are born of necessity: "/s", for example, can indicate sarcasm in an intonationless medium. Other conventions are old hat: CAPITAL LETTERS CAN SHOW EMPHASIS OR A STRONG EMOTION LIKE ANGER OR EXCITEMENT. One might use superscript to whisper, or add extra vowels to reeeeally emphasise a point. Reddit users are often delighted by bad puns of the sort your uncle might make. And while you can find emoticons anywhere across the web, emoticon creativity reaches a zenith on the comment boards of websites like 4chan and Reddit. One might express disapproval with a ಠ_ಠ (using the Kannada letter for the unvoiced, aspirated, retroflex consonant ʈʰa), or anger with a (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ (a pictogram of someone flipping a table over).

There are language games, too. One, known as "Ermahgerd", originated as a written representation of speech produced through an orthodontic retainer (of the sort which your correspondent, alas, used to wear). "Ermahgerd", of course, means "oh my god". Know Your Meme, a website which documents the origin and spread of memes on the Internet, reports further. The orthodontic retainer jokes aren't new, as any teenager with braces might tell you, but its written representation is. As Know Your Meme points out in an informational video, "Ermahgerd" has become a language game akin to Pig Latin or Verlan, with those in the know—Redditors and other online denizens—producing and understanding their own unique brand of funny gobbledygook. The result is nearly incomprehensible, but the joke is apparent when the text is read phonetically. The Economist? Nope. The Erkernermerst? Yerp.

Quick, easy image editing software has fostered a new blossoming of visual language pithier and richer than tweets. Image macros, for example, are pictures featuring large text. For recurring characters like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian, short descriptive phrases or quotes frame a familiar face. The trick is simple, but the effect is uniquely funny. It's not the same to read "The lazy college senior (whose stories I trust you know quite well) heard that his paper was due tomorrow, to which he responded 'Do tomorrow.'" These jokes aren't just silly pictures and they're not quite the same as captioned cartoons. They're something different. In telling a joke to a friend, we might flail our arms or modulate our voices, adding animation for humour. Without those tools on the Internet, and with newly rapid, real-time interactions, other forms of presentation have emerged.

Reddit isn't the only forum for new language conventions, but it is an especially productive one. Twitter's emphasis on brevity fostered the #hashtag, whose popularity as a simple form of categorisation infected other media where hashtags are useless as a tool but important as a social identifier. Facebook introduced us to an exceedingly noncommittal form of communication, the "Like" button. (In fact, a federal circuit court in the U.S. is considering whether "liking" is considered speech protected by the U.S. Constitution.)

Lest language grouches lament the future of English, not all is lost. They find occasional company amongst grammar and spelling enthusiasts on Reddit, including one user who corrected Mr Obama's article usage. But to those who despair rather than enjoy the silliness and creativity of Internet language games, I respectfully suggest you take up company with this cat.