How technology remakes language.

ONE HAS LATELY heard much of the hashtag. That is, the Twitter symbol #, used to categorize a tweet. Charlie Sheen’s first tweet, for example, was famously: “Winning ..! Choose your Vice... #winning #chooseyourvice.” #Winning has gone on to live in irony across the Twitterverse, in mockery of the eternally less-than-winning Sheen. But even President Obama recently urged students to tweet their senators about raising the interest rates on federally subsidized student loans with the hashtag “#DontDoubleMyRate.”

The new thing, however, is using the word “hashtag” in conversation. Especially if you are under a certain age, you may be catching people saying things like, “I ran into that guy I met—hashtag happy!” or, in response to someone complaining, “My flashlight app isn’t working,” perhaps you have heard the retort, “Hashtag First World problems!” A college student not long ago reported a favorite witticism to be appending observations with: “Hashtag did that just happen?”

Given that Twitter, along with texting and instant-messaging, is so often thought of as a dire threat to the writing skills of the American adults of tomorrow—not to mention to the English language and therefore civilization itself—what in the world does it mean that people are now speaking in Twitter? Not much, actually. Twitter may be changing the way we talk but not in a way that is cause for concern. In other words: Hashtag chill out.

THE SPOKEN HASHTAG is part of a general trend—one rarely treated as a scourge, generally barely perceived, and actually a sign of the zeitgeist. I refer to a tendency to frame ourselves in conversation as performers, from an ironic distance, in a way that would have been impossible before movies and television began to deeply permeate modern life. “Hashtag happy” elicits a mental picture of the speaker viewed from a distance, labeled with the word happy. Think of the way someone often describes having received great news while miming a holler, “Yeah!”—pumping his fist, putting on the grimace one would have while actually yelling, but uttering the cheer sotto voce. It’s a cheer in quotation marks—a cheer framed and viewed from afar. One could not do this without living and breathing film and television as we do. What reason would a rainforest tribesman have to depict himself cheering with the volume turned down?

Nor is it unusual for written conventions to make their way into speech. Acronyms are rife in modern speech: VIP, NATO, NGO, MILF. Then there are expressions such as “e.g.” and “i.e.” and “with a capital ...”—all of which are so well-established that they feel like speech to most of us. But they emerged from writing and would make no sense without it. It’s not intuitive for illiterate people to break words down into isolated sounds or letters, as acronyms require; they are more likely to sense that words are composed of syllables, that is, chunks of sounds.