The transmission of ideas, expressions, and language is a fascinating topic. A topic that had engaged me at several points in my career, but one to which I could never devote any time, so I’m not particularly knowledgeable. What follows is a fairly uneducated ramble through some of my recent musings …
Five years ago, one particular friend of mine signed all of his emails “cheers”. That was kind of cool, I thought, and it set him apart from the more formal/correct but bland “regards” that I tend to use. I started noticing an increased usage of “cheers” maybe 18 months ago, and perhaps even used it a time or two myself. Then it just exploded, some non-trivial fraction of emails I get are signed “cheers” these days, in fact, an quick review of my emails received over the last month shows 156 out of 2544 contain the word == 5.9%. For me, it’s over; the meme has spread too widely. I’m tired of it, I don’t want to be cheered all the time.
But, somewhere there’s an interesting thesis either already written or waiting to be written, about the velocity of change of language usage as propagated via email and online writing.
What sparked this blog entry was a discussion I was having yesterday with the top tech guy of iAmplify (cool audio-blogging with monetization play, worth a look). He took a brief call during our meeting and used the expression “no worries”. Now, friend/ceo Bruce has used the “no worries” expression for years. But yesterday’s chat caused my awareness of this phrase to cross some threshold, and I realized that I’ve been increasingly hearing it lately. I suspect it’s on the uptick and we’ll be hearing lots more “no worries” in the near future.
Brough wrote a week or two ago about the promise of statistical-based machine translation systems. I reflected last night that any email hosting company could potentially mine their traffic flow to generate a very interesting picture about the evolution of our language and popularity of phrases, memes, etc. Are linguistic departments way ahead already?
There are also other expressions that identify something about a person’s background. “Meme” used in the title of this piece is in fact one such word, as is “proper noun” e.g. “I don’t know the proper nouns for that industry”. When someone uses one of these words, I mentally place them in certain categories. Our vocabulary and writing style tell a huge story about who we are and the path we have traveled. A provider with a large volume of email, (google, aol, yahoo) could begin to correlate word / phrase / grammar usage with a other derived meta-data such as job categories, socio-economic status, geographic location, political leanings, etc. and could possibly build a statistical engine that could examine a fragment of writing and generate a scary degree of insight into the person that wrote it. A great tool, but also one more layer removed on our privacy and anonymity. This is the future that we are heading toward, driven by the inexorable laws of Moore and Metcalfe, the technology of massive server / storage farms, and the massive shift to digital communications.
“Cheers,”
Steve
It only took about 6 months for the expression ‘cool beans’ to propogate back to me. There is no telling the loop path it took, but it came quiter out of the blue, and I almost think there’s some 6th degree of separation phenomena extant in the internet.
“No worries” is Strine. I has been around Australia for donkeys years (a long time). Head over to Oz and everyone uses the phrase. “No worries” is also not the only strine to move in general english use. The word “reckon” has also began the move and there are others. I think this shows the increasing Aussie influence on US/UK culture and the effect of the exposure of the Sydney Olympics.
I’ve been using “cheers” in email for 10 years now (in Canada). I find that it’s usage here is still infrequent. I’ve recently moved to the West Coast, where there seems to be a lot of Aussies on working holidays, and I am hearing it a lot more in everyday convos.