O Rly?

Gawker’s new editor Max Read, in a memo to his writers last week, laid down the law on Internet slang:

Internet slang. We used to make an effort to avoid this, and now I see us all falling back into the habit. We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not Buzzfeed writers or Reddit commenters. Therefore: No “epic.” No “pwn.” No “+1.” No “derp.” No “this”/”this just happened.” No “OMG.” No “WTF.” No “lulz.” No “FTW.” No “win.” No “amazeballs.” And so on. Nothing will ever “win the internet” on Gawker. As with all rules there are exceptions. Err on the side of the Times, not XOJane.

McWhorter warns Read that he’s probably fighting a losing battle:

As odd as it is to imagine serious people saying FTW (“for the win”) over breakfast in 2050, imagine living in the 1830s and imagine a world in which one regularly hears “O.K,” which started as affectionate initials for Martin Van Buren’s nickname “Old Kinderhook” and got a boost from standing for a hypothetical attempt by unlettered Andrew Jackson to write “all correct,” “oll korrect.” Surely no one then imagined that 185 years later we would be using the word as a synonym for, of all things, “yes.” Even jolly little “amazeballs” might seem less evanescent if we consider that the use of “ass” with adjectives—big-ass, lame-ass—seems to be with us forever, and feels less connected with the gluteal region by the year.

But where Read really risks looking a tad quaint is with his subtler concerns—the idea that “massive” and “epic” are overused rather than simply trending the way words have always done. Read gives a charmingly baroque thesaurus-style list of available synonyms for massive. But is this concern much different from the regret, voiced by eighteenth-century diarist Hester Piozzi, that people were increasingly saying “feeling” instead of “sentiment”? She didn’t much like it—to her, feeling was an action while sentiment was a concept.