Introduction
one of the last frontiers of genuine mystery in the world of the information age was the realm of “weird twitter,” a collective of oddly-branded twitter accounts emerging in the early days of the app that shared a disorienting brand of humor that blended non-sequiturs with syntactical irregularities in order to produce a style of absurd, online speak that i would contend still influences a lot of internet humor to this day. @dril is probably the most popular and consistent accounts of this brand of humor to this day. my favorite examples of these accounts were ones that nobody had any idea of who was running them or where they came from.
this is the online environment i grew up in, and i honestly think it made some weird wrinkles in my brain that permanently informed my style of interactions with people. i mean, i tried to create my own “weird twitter” account and strove to go viral for my own silly wordplays or absurd observations of the world. today a reformed individual, i try to seek my self-actualization through other mediums, like the real world, but like i said, that wrinkle in my brain is still there.
one of the more confounding examples of this era of the internet was @Horse_ebooks, an account that would mostly rattle off purely nonsensical tweets before at times stumbling upon word strings that endowed knowledge between fractured grammar and incomplete sentences.1 the most famous is this iconic tweet that i’ve embedded below:
now, i don’t necessarily want to belabor what this tweet means, or what its cultural impact was, because others have already belabored it (check my links below, whatever). what i do want to belabor is how this mantra fits into the very constitution of my subjective ontology and understanding of self as a part of a world where meaning in general is very fractured and nonsensical.
Postmodern Grammars
linguistic prescriptivists are goddamn cowards. sure, we need a common language to understand one another, but creativity is an inherent beauty of communication through language. think of shakespeare, who would just reel off made-up words and was considered a genius. we used to be a more sensible people. think of f. scott fitzgerald talking about the orgastic pleasure that day by day recedes us like boats borne back ceaselessly in the past. orgastic wasn’t a word until f. scott revealed new truths to us through the adjectivication of orgasm. adjectivication ain’t a word but you catch my goddamn drift. perchance.
point is, we need a few rules to be established to ensure mutual comprehension, but from there, a lot of prescriptivism is just grammar police hodgepodge. pseudo-intellectualism. knowing arbitrary rules isn’t intelligence, folks. knowing arbitrary rules and breaking them like dry spaghetti to service the unique arguments of your inner monologue, which have no language, is brilliance. now, language absolutely does rewire your brain and your thought processes. but we’ll come back to that point.2
prescriptivism is something that is truly drilled in american education, as well as many others i am SURE. if you’re a french speaker you better hope you speak that prescriptive parisian french lest you get bullied for butchering the language of molière (who probably also made up words, like shakespeare). i’m gonna go ahead and call this strict prescriptive attitude towards language as modernism, because this isn’t an academic blog and i don’t have to explain why i’m adapting terminology.
modernist grammars are exactly the type of grammar, wordings, and spellings that one masters for fear of getting assaulted by a yardstick.3 and since they’re drilled in school, people get the notion that having these rules down makes you that much more intelligent. and this is perpetuated enough so that it serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and voila, a language digs in deep ruts with its rules for ‘proper’ usage.
enter postmodern grammars. like any good deconstruction, it comes from an excellent understanding material from which it derives. postmodernism as a movement generally concerns itself with deconstructions of modern narratives and conventions, utilizing this subversion to make new points about the world in which the expression exists.
while social media or weird twitter are certainly not the origins for postmodern grammars, it certainly provided a wide platform for the proliferation of such use in communication. part of this is the fact that it’s limited by character restrictions, part of it is the fact that anybody with internet can hop on the web and share their truly strange thoughts and ideas with a wide audience.
but social media brought more than just novel joke formats and forms of written communication. this may be more apparent in hindsight, but social media also brought about the erosion of truth and objectivity. donald trump’s twitter was the zenith of this movement for now, but with AI deepfakes and text generation picking up steam, we can see that he was only the beginning.
we are entering a post-truth world, or one could say we’re already there. the world got much too complicated for us to understand a while back, and we have little interaction with many of the actual things that influence our lives. much of what we know about far-flung reaches of the world are distilled through media, which we are constantly surrounded by.
our drift from accepting objectivities in our understanding of the world aligns with a drift away from objectivities in formal language. bent, misshapen grammars convey a greater phenomenological significance that underlies the content of the statement. language reflects the thoroughly nonsensical regressions of contemporary life by adapting the same stubborn ambiguities and absurdism that are so saturated in our daily life.
Neoliberalism and Linguistic Prescriptivism
there’s a reason linguistic prescriptivism is so drilled within us. knowledge is power, and attaching arbitrary assignments of power to language usage provides an easy thing that the highly educated can point to to assert dominance over someone who either didn’t grow up speaking all posh or someone who has an accent or etc.
some of the prescriptive rules of language are so arbitrary, that knowledge of them is really just a reflection of a kid having better schooling. i like to mention french in this context because it’s a language i have experience in that goes so heavy on preserving norms.4 there is a whole tense in french that is only used in writing that has no change in grammar. it’s simply just “past tense but literary” this is an incredibly inaccessible aspect of the language for someone who wants to go touch grass.
continuing with the french example, we start to see how a hierarchy is built around colonial lines. you want to be taken seriously as a francophone scholar? better speak with that parisian accent and throw a bunch of throaty “euuhs” in there when you can’t think of what to say. and don’t you be speaking with a quebecois accent.
the point is, the additional plus of postmodern grammar is that it is a protest against neoliberalism and capitalism. even my small, valiant act of typing in all lowercase is emblematic of a protest against the stringent rules of language that continue to be enforced by insecure scholars who want to be taken seriously.
The Cultural Moment
all this ties into the literature of our time. the current moment, baby. the here and now. we are approaching an impasse at which we are collectively forced to pay for the accumulating transgressions of unchecked neoliberalism and traditional economic development. global citizenship has become a never-ending march of incomprehensible tragedy and destruction. maybe part of it is the 24hr news cycle that amplifies stories of violence, but a bigger part of it is the proliferation of previously unseen climate disasters that are constantly communicating a sense of inevitable, global doom, the likes of which have never been overcome in human history and will require a complete reset of mindsets regarding ‘development’ that have been in progress for the last two centuries.
this shift towards the incomprehensible has necessitated creativity in communication’s form. it’s hard to respond anymore to the formality that is so tightly associated with the social movements that have contributed to the brink that we all find ourselves approaching now. for example, it is physically painful to tell someone to not talk to me until i’ve had my coffee. such a sentiment has to be coated with such an intense irony that demonstrates an awareness of the corniness and a trust in the audience that they will appreciate your postmodern take on the traditional boomer humor.5
“Everything happens so much” is a sort of play on a traditional phrase, like ‘there’s a lot going on right now’ or ‘you see the news lately? woah nelly!’, but its incompleteness suggests a sort of child-lost-in-the-supermarket confusion that communicates a loss of control over circumstances just as much as the sentence communicates a loss of control over more traditional sentence constructions that encapsulate the idea of ‘so much.’
staying sane and above it all is to just throw up your arms. everything happens so much. ‘what do you mean by that?’ yes.
Footnotes
1: i’m choosing to buy into the collective amnesia regarding the circumstances of its big reveal. apparently the people behind the account revealed themselves in order to sell some high-concept video game. intriguing, but i am a bit hurt upon learning this. articles in the atlantic (subscription required) and polygon for additional lore:
2: i’m not returning to this point. i’m not a behavioral linguist. go read some phd student’s thesis on the topic or something they need the views.
3: i’m not that old, like abusing kids wasn’t cool when i grew up. which is good, abusing kids has never really been a good thing and a lot of times i think people just want to inflict pain on these powerless innocent souls as retribution for the pain that their poor innocent souls underwent in their own childhoods. children are unbelievably intelligent and are able to learn the ways of the world quick, and they do it without a hint of the cynicism that they learn to develop later on from this cruel and stupid world. so why smack the shit out of them? to make them out to be ruthless fuck ups in their future? to perpetuate the notion of resorting to abuse in moments of perceived powerlessness? fucking get a grip if you’re a parent.
4: look no further than l’académie française, an organization consisting of a very carefully-chosen body of like 30 authors works to preserve and provide final say on prescriptive elements of the french language. as if there aren’t 400 million people who speak it regularly.
5: one of my favorite subreddits is r/AntiAntiJokes, and while it’s embarrassing to say such a thing as ‘my favorite subreddit is…’ i bring it up because it is a community that takes the idea of deconstructive humor for a postmodern audience to its absolute limit by producing ‘jokes’ that are so coated in metatextuality or just pure nonsense that they produce a comedic effect that is often confusing. also yes fiendin for the cup of joe so that you can do work is right in the spirit of neoliberalism.
The Ant and The Paperclip 
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