Gizmodo ran an article last week by Sam Biddle, titled “How the Hashtag is Ruining the English Language”. And, as I’ve begun to realize articles titled “How X is doing Y” tend to do, it forgets to explain how exactly the hashtag* is ruining English; at best, it presents a mildly convincing case that the hashtag has become an overused catchphrase.
So what’s wrong with hashtagging? It’s not that Biddle’s against categorizing tweets; he’s against a recent semantic expansion of hashtagging. Many people have taken to what I’m going to refer to as meta-hashtagging, where hashes are used not as category labels but rather as paralinguistic markers. Biddle doesn’t care for it, largely because he thinks that “the hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence”.
But is that the case? The use of the meta-hashtag is certainly noisy; some people use it incompetently, and others idiosyncratically. But if we look at the general usage patterns, I think there’s actually substantial structure to it. The primary usage of the meta-hashtag is to make meta-commentary — that is, commentary on what you’re saying, often from a slightly different point of view. This is not something new; Susan Orlean discussed it on the New Yorker‘s site in June 2010.
For instance, @ourboldhero is the guy that I really learned the meta-hashtag from, when he posted things like:
Scare quotes on Wikipedia may be my new favorite thing: Smelting involves more than just “melting the metal out of its ore” #ohwikipedia
Morning Dan knew that if he threw out the last of the toothpaste I’d have to go shopping at some point tonight, and buy him milk #wellplayed
In both of these cases, if I were reading them aloud, I’d say the hashtagged material in a different voice from the rest of it, complete with hand gestures and overwrought facial expressions. These hashtagged phrases can function like a narrator or, as @EllieTr neatly put it, a chorus in a Greek play. They can offer the author’s opinion on someone else’s writing, as in the first tweet, or a just change the point-of-view from the tweeter to a more neutral, narrator-like view, as in the second. (Also, note that these hashtags double as reasonable category labels.)
There are many different applications of the meta-hashtag. I can’t put together an entire ontology of meta-hashtagging, but let me talk about two additional prominent uses that show there is more going on than just a confederacy of dunces misusing the pound sign because they think it makes them cool. (This is going to overlap a bit with Language Log’s post on hashtags.)
One use is to indicate a general sense of the preceding material. Biddle does this in his opening paragraph: “Unfortunately, the hashtag is ruining talking. #NotGonnaLie”. This type of usage was probably the spawn of the meta-hashtag — it’s category-like in that it classifies the tweet, but it’s also adding information about the tweet itself.
Another common use I’ve seen is to indicate irony, as discussed at some length by Ben Zimmer. Biddle’s article targets #winning, the meme that took off as everyone chuckled as Charlie Sheen’s mental health flew apart in front of our eyes. Biddle objects:
“#Winning. It took off as the lowbrow badge of choice across Twitterdom, signifying success without showing it. You could say the saddest heap of shit, add #winning, and that seven letter thumbs up would make it OK.”
But the truth is that it isn’t serious. #Winning has never been the same as winning. No one thought Charlie Sheen was really winning when he said he was; he was falling apart. When people tweet that they’re #winning, it generally doesn’t seem to be for something honestly great. It’s used ironically, for something falling somewhere on the spectrum between mildly good and actually embarrassing:
Just bought 75 glow sticks for $5 #winning. New Years is gonna be awesome. It’s the #simple things in life that make me happy.
my dad is cooking ribs tonight!! #winning.
My longest trip for the past week has been from my bed to my couch #winning
There are a variety of other uses I’ve seen, from adding emphasis to suggesting a pause between sentences. As a result, I disagree with Biddle’s classification of the meta-hashtag as “without rules, sense, or intelligence”. There is a pattern to it, and one that is, I suspect, increasing its clarity rather than decreasing it.
Biddle is right that meta-hashtagging is often used incompetently — but the same could be said of humor, of rhetorical devices, of all of language. Do we ban analogies because many writers offer bad ones? No, we grit through the bad and wait for the good.
Meta-hashtagging has been and will continue to be used infelicitously. No question there. But it’s also used cleverly, and I find that the good uses outweigh the bad. Even if you don’t share my opinion that the meta-hashtag is an interesting addition to language, surely you can agree that it’s a serious underestimation of the strength of language to suppose it could be ruined by something so insignificant as the pound sign.
And on that point, I have to ask why Biddle thinks that the meta-hashtag is going ruin English. Here are the five reasons I found in his article:
- It’s used without an obvious pattern
- People could just use regular words
- It’s an inside joke amongst Twitter users
- It’s a “lazy reach for substance”
- Noam Chomsky doesn’t use it
I don’t agree with these points, especially the first. But suppose we take them at face value. How do these five points lead to the conclusion that meta-hashtagging is ruining English? They’re limited little things that can’t do anything to the rest of the language. In fact, I suspect that Biddle knows this and that he’s just going in for a bit of cheap hyperbole — the exact same sort of cheap hyperbole that he’s accusing the users of #winning of doing. As Biddle himself might have said,
“You could complain about the tiniest bit of English, add ‘it’s ruining the English language’, and that five word thumbs down would make it unacceptable.”
—
*: For readers who aren’t familiar with hashtagging, it’s when someone writes a word prefaced by a pound sign (e.g., #eating). Hashtags arose on Twitter as a way of classifying tweets. Suppose you want to see what everyone’s saying about something really cool, like, let’s say, grammar. If you just search for “grammar”, you’ll get false positives from “grammar school” and junk like that. But if someone put #grammar in the tweet, they’re saying “this tweet is about grammar”, so searching for #grammar drops the false positives substantially. Hashtags function as categories within Twitter, but it’s a very ephemeral category structure, since the tags are generated by users. If you haven’t before, try searching for something in its hashtagged and nonhashtagged forms before continuing.
22 comments
Comments feed for this article
January 3, 2012 at 9:51 am
mike
Heh. Hashtags FTW! :-)
January 3, 2012 at 10:58 am
Emily Michelle
How could an inside joke amongst Twitter users ruin the entire language? An inside joke, by its very nature, is limited to a select group of people. Anyway, I think hashtags are hilarious, and I also think it’s hilarious that you decided to subject them to serious examination. Nice post.
January 3, 2012 at 11:14 am
The Corresponder
Good rebuttal. The comments also saw others pointing to the decline in education, another frequent victim of finger pointing–do you have any view on that?
January 3, 2012 at 11:54 am
Fuschia Rayon
I agree completely, with one exception: the hashtag ‘#justsayin’ or any variation thereon should be banned from all the internet.
January 10, 2012 at 8:32 pm
m.m.
#ilikethisverymuch
January 13, 2012 at 8:49 am
This Week’s Language Blog Roundup | Wordnik ~ all the words
[…] R. Grammarphobia explained where the word hobnob comes from; Motivated Grammar assured us hashtags aren’t ruining anything; and Grammar Girl told us the origins of the @ symbol and the word […]
January 13, 2012 at 8:53 am
Alex
I’m one of those people who uses hashtags in normal conversation. I have had entire conversations in hashtags. I love that addition to the language. (I’m also a linguist, so.)
#bylinguistiofcoursemeansadandpatheticindividual #hardlydifferent
January 14, 2012 at 9:01 am
Michelle Corbin (@michellecorbin)
Hi. I stumbled upon your blog from another blog, but immediately subscribed to your RSS feed and have enjoyed reading it ever since. For this reason, I have chosen you for the Versatile Blogger Award. I was chosen (http://techeditors.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/someones-actually-reading-my-blog/), and I have in turn chosen you as one of my most inspiring and useful blogs that I read on a regular basis. Congratulations and keep on blogging! See my post for the rules and links about this award.
January 19, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Neal
I like your coinage of “meta-hashtagging”. I think it stands a decent chance of catching on if people continue to engage in its referent.
June 20, 2012 at 9:22 am
Isch Amehil
After reading the Gizmodo article, you would see it does for many. Maybe not for an established blogger who deals with perfect grammar and spelling all day, but for the average person, it does exactly what they say it does.
January 23, 2013 at 12:26 am
Hashtag #adj2012 – Sprachlog
[…] Metakategorisierung (meta-hashtagging) die englische Sprache ruinieren (und warum das nicht so ist: hier oder hier). Dies dürfte im deutschsprachigen Raum solange eine unbegründete Sorge sein, wie […]
August 1, 2013 at 10:48 pm
Bob
100% agree. #Upvote
January 4, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Jonathan
I don’t tweet or spend much time on twitter, but I’m familiar with # as a grammatical marker from Bball fansites. At least in the environments I see it, it seems to mean that what precedes the # is an example or category of what follows the #. It may be used sarcastically or seriously, but which is usually obvious.
January 21, 2014 at 5:17 pm
Mike Hawk
It’s not the use that’s ruining English… parsay. Rather, it’s the OVERuse, as far, far too many people are doing. It’s terribly annoying when everything posted by some people has to be filled with a million completely irrelevant hashtags! I understand that, in a perfect world, they could be useful. The problem is, people tend to abuse such features, as a cry for attention or otherwise. Now Facebook is permeated with them, and it’s disgusting how misused they are! To hell with hashtags.
June 25, 2014 at 3:13 pm
writerscarnivalclasses.ca
[…] or for snark ewillse: Something to read later: A wonky grammar blog on how hashtags are used https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/the-hashtags-not-ruining-anything/ ewillse: hashtags can be category or commentary ewillse: you can use them in a very self-aware way […]
December 1, 2014 at 12:43 pm
JR
No matter what you say, hashtagging is not acceptable, and the population needs to think long and hard about the way language is progressing. Are we really going to go back to the days of cavemen when we grunt and groan with one simple word??? Savor the flavor of language!
December 2, 2014 at 2:05 pm
Daniel
JR: If I may offer some friendly advice, then let me simply suggest that announcing that you disagree with the post without giving any reason why or any support for your position, combined with the usual hyperbolic doomsaying about how our language is going to somehow devolve into wordless grunting, is unlikely to convince anyone who has actually studies the language. #prescriptivismmustdie #hashtagsforever #doesthisbotheryouimnottouchingyou #igot99problemsbutahashtagaintone
January 9, 2015 at 12:28 pm
How #Hashtags Changed the Way we Talk - The Tint Blog
[…] a sign of the zeitgeist? Gabe Doyle, a linguist at Stanford, makes the same point about tweets as meta-commentary, but he compares hashtags to the narrator of a book and a chorus in a Greek play. He calls it a […]
February 6, 2015 at 3:37 am
Day 5: #Hashtags | 10 Days of Twitter @ the University of Toronto
[…] can also be used as commentary (or meta-hashtag) on the main message of the […]
April 15, 2015 at 4:08 am
Mike
“it’s when someone writes a word prefaced by a pound sign (e.g., #eating)” – Surely it’s prefaced by the hash symbol? Hence the name. It just so happens to be located where the pound sign £ would be if you were using a UK keyboard. Otherwise it would be called the poundtag.
June 17, 2016 at 4:48 am
Day 5: #Hashtags – 10 Days of Twitter @ the University of Toronto
[…] can also be used as commentary (or meta-hashtag) on the main message of the […]
April 21, 2017 at 5:40 am
Day 5: #Hashtags – 10 Days of Twitter @ the University of Toronto #UofT10DoT
[…] can also be used as commentary (or meta-hashtag) on the main message of the […]