I thought this was an interesting interview. I knew what she was going to say and I what the comments would be like.

It got me thinking about language and how we use it to rank each other, sometimes without knowing it. Dialects are judged to be “low” or ignorant. As informal writing proliferates, the same thing happens with written language.

Elitists and old people are like, “No! Stop! You’re doing it wrong!”

I have a BA in English, so I learned a lot about the rules, how English “supposed” to be.

But I took one Linguistics class in college and that changed everything. I learned how languages change and evolve. And I learned something my grammar nazi mother absolutely hated: Rules follow usage.

When enough people do it, it’s the new rule. I also love language. I like playing with slang & doing it wrong on purpose if it works. Gen Z is treating language exactly as you should expect. Adapting it to their environment.

It reminded me of the NBC video clip I saw a while back about Gen Z doing away with the period. I had the same knee jerk reaction as a lot of people: Damn kids, learn how to write! But after watching the video I’ll be damned if it didn’t end up making sense. It’s texting. I don’t end texts with periods half the time.

It’s adaptive. They’re learning how to make a notoriously unexpressive media convey emotion.

I love language. I love the way you can mold it and shape it. I love how it adapts. I only know a little Spanish, enough to read signs and packages, but if I could go back in time, I’d learn a dozen languages. I bet I was a linguist in one of my alternate dimensional lives. I wonder how many I learned.

Language is almost metaphysically important if you think about it. The language you speak determines what you can even think about, what you think is real or possible. How mindblowing is that?