‘I will always ride for my man!’ Kim Kardashian once tweeted — and though the internet didn’t implode (at the time), your eighth-grade English teacher might have. Not because it was ungrammatical — it wasn’t — but because it drew from a register that traditional gatekeepers of language still find suspect: emotionally expressive, digitally native, and rooted in Black vernacular. Ride for my man isn’t a typo. It’s a phrase with history, rhythm, and cultural lineage — and yet, in certain circles, it still reads as informal, unserious, even incorrect.

This tension — between what’s technically correct and what’s culturally policed — is at the heart of how language works in the digital age. Today’s most vital forms of expression are lowercase, emoji-laced, meme-coded, typo-prone, and bursting with affect. They thrive on style, subtext, and shared references. They’re not broken — they’re doing something else entirely.

As Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek write in Digital Discourse, “Language is, at its heart, a cultural construction… working with the idea of language as a technology forces an ongoing consideration of the constant interplay of the message and the medium.” In this view, internet language isn’t a step backward — it’s a new, multimodal vernacular that adapts to the tools and tempos of our time.

So what if the things we’ve been taught to mock — lowercase typing, emojis, memes — are actually more truthful, more alive, and more democratic than ‘standard’ English? What if the so-called “messiness” of digital language isn’t a degradation at all, but a resistance — a refusal to play by rules designed to exclude?

The Rules Were Always Rigged: A brief history of linguistic gatekeeping

Linguistic authority has never been neutral. From the earliest attempts to codify “proper” English, the rules have functioned less like guidelines for clarity and more like velvet ropes for cultural belonging. Orm’s twelfth-century homiletic verse — one of the first attempts at consistent English spelling — wasn’t just devotional, it was disciplinary. He wasn’t just concerned with souls; he was concerned with syllables. And that anxiety only sharpened over time.

By the 18th century, prescriptivists like Robert Lowth (who wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762) and Lindley Murray (who wrote English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners in 1795) began issuing grammar rules with near-biblical force. Their books weren’t just about sentence structure — they were manuals for moral and social refinement. Language, they believed, revealed the soul. In reality, it revealed class. “Proper” English became the province of the elite — the kind spoken in drawing rooms, printed in newspapers, and passed down through private education. Everyone else was told to aspire, correct, or stay silent.

But prestige is a moving target. As Georg Simmel wrote, “Each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life.” Language, like fashion, operates on a trickle-down logic: once a form becomes too widely used, the cultural elite either abandon it — or rebrand it. Mid-Atlantic English, once the voice of American aristocracy, now sounds like a parody. Corporate jargon — “per my last email,” “circle back,” “I just want to flag” — has become so ubiquitous that Gen Z comedians like @CorporateNatalie now mock its passive-aggressive polish in viral TikToks.

And then there’s delulu. Originally a tongue-in-cheek term from K-pop fandoms, delulu (as in delusional) has traveled from niche internet slang to the halls of power. When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused the opposition this week of being “delulu with no solulu,” he wasn’t just flexing cultural fluency — he was participating in a long-standing tradition of linguistic appropriation. A word once dismissed as juvenile is now parliamentary material. The same forces that once scorned digital dialects now use them to project relevance and charisma. As Simmel might say: the prestige class didn’t abandon this form — they co-opted it.

This is how gatekeeping works. The rules shift not based on clarity or correctness, but on who’s speaking. What we call “bad grammar” is often a euphemism for “bad class” — a marker of who’s allowed to set the tone and who’s expected to catch up. The real mistake isn’t a typo. It’s thinking the rules were ever about language.

The Emoji is the Accent of the Internet

Contrary to the tired claim that texting and online speech are flattening language, digital communication has never been more layered. Far from stripping nuance, the internet has exploded it — transforming how we signal tone, emotion, and intent through a rich tapestry of visual, rhythmic, and structural cues. Emojis, memes, keyboard choices, GIFs, and text formatting don’t just decorate our messages — they are the message.

Linguists Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek put it simply: “All texts… are always achieved by means of multiple semiotic resources.” On the internet, we write with faces, colors, line breaks, and aesthetic glitches. We add asterisks for emphasis, use the sparkle emoji to convey camp or queerness, and deliberately lower-case to appear soft, casual, or ironically detached. This isn’t accidental. It’s a new kind of fluency — a digital accent system where tone isn’t spoken, but styled.

Take the emoji: a modern heir to gesture and facial expression, it’s functionally equivalent to intonation in spoken conversation. A simple thumbs-up can read as sincere, sarcastic, or passive-aggressive depending on the context and relationship — not unlike how a nod or a raised eyebrow would function in real life. Similarly, a line like ok. versus ok versus ok!! 😊 carries a wildly different emotional weight. The period alone — once a neutral grammatical stop — now signals tension, finality, or even quiet rage in text messages. As Gretchen McCulloch notes in Because Internet, punctuation has become the new tone of voice.

We’re even watching these tensions play out in pop culture. In The Z-Suite — a 2025 workplace comedy starring Lauren Graham as a Gen-X executive floundering in a Gen Z office — entire scenes are built around emoji illiteracy, passive-aggressive punctuation, and the chaos of Slack-thread power dynamics. The show doesn’t just play these moments for laughs; it stages a deeper linguistic shift: polished, corporate-speak is losing its hold, and chaotic emoji-speak is claiming its place as the new lingua franca of digital belonging.

To call this language “sloppy” is to miss the point entirely. This is not a breakdown — it’s a breakthrough. Online, we’ve built a multimodal dialect that draws from gesture, sound, affect, and aesthetic design. It’s intimate, performative, often genre-bending — and it works. Emojis aren’t the death of grammar. They’re just a new kind.

Digital Language as Social Resistance and Style

To dismiss digital language as chaotic is to miss the point. Its chaos is curated — a performance of self, solidarity, and sometimes subversion. Across TikTok, Tumblr, and Twitter (or whatever we’re calling it this week), users — especially youth, queer communities, and Black digital culture — have developed rich, expressive dialects that defy the rules of Standard English not by accident, but by design.

Online, spelling becomes style. Language becomes a look. Carmel Vaisman’s research on Israeli teen bloggers found that for many, the appearance of a word mattered more than its formal correctness — a dynamic that holds true in today’s aesthetic spelling and intentional typos. Think: gurl instead of girl (queer-coded, campy, knowing); smol cat memes; or the now-ubiquitous yesss, loooove, and hiiiiii, all stretching letters to signal affect, excitement, or intimacy. This is not lazy communication — it’s stylized communication. It’s meaning-making through vibe.

We see this in intentional misspellings too: i’m cryign rn, am dum, brain empty no thoughts, or what is hapenignn — phrases that dramatize flustered emotion, self-deprecating humor, or collective chaos. They parody the frantic texture of life online while cultivating a kind of in-group relatability. And these choices aren’t arbitrary. As linguist Tereza Spilioti notes, “Texters make complex, situated decisions… with a view to relationship history and topical relevance.” In other words: the typo is often more precise than the correction.

This style of orthographic play is especially prevalent in subcultural corners of the internet — Black Twitter, fandom spaces, queer meme accounts — where language resists institutional polish and instead signals belonging, wit, or resistance. As Digital Discourse puts it, “Orthographic play often privileges the visual-aesthetic form of language – the look of the words – over its communicative function.” These deviations from Standard English aren’t just expressive — they’re insurgent. They challenge the supremacy of normative language, which has long been weaponized to marginalize non-white, non-male, non-affluent voices.

Even absurdist accounts like @dril — the godfather of ironic Twitter — wield intentional typos as a kind of digital dadaism. Posts like i do not know what is happening but i am here for moral support or i’m cryign rn aren’t just jokes; they’re moodboards for collective feeling, glitchy performance art that’s somehow more emotionally legible than anything AP style would permit.

And then there are memes — like 2025’s “recession indicators,” where users joked about switching to tap water or air-drying laundry as signs of economic doom. On the surface: jokes. But in reality? Micro-performances of class anxiety, linguistically dressed in all-caps, typos, and irony-soaked exaggeration. These memes aren’t sloppiness — they’re solidarity, made legible through visual, rhythmic, and orthographic flair.

Linguist William Labov argued that even language change is socially motivated. And here, we see that motivation clearly: digital language functions as cultural currency, survival strategy, and expressive rebellion. It codes identity. It carves community. And it quietly flips the bird to systems that equate “good English” with good citizenship.

The so-called improper is often the most intimate, the most inventive, the most alive.

The Linguistic Class Politics of ‘Good English’

If language is power, then “good English” is one of its oldest gatekeeping tools. Standardized English — polished, unaccented, unemotional — still serves as a litmus test for intelligence, competence, and professionalism in the institutions that shape public life: schools, courtrooms, boardrooms, and bylines. Never mind that the internet now runs on memes, emojis, and Black vernacular — when it comes to getting the job, publishing the article, or passing the interview, the rules haven’t changed. We still ask: Do you sound like the right kind of person?

Deborah Cameron, in Verbal Hygiene, calls out how language norms are framed as neutral or commonsensical, but are in fact deeply political. Who gets to decide what’s “correct”? Who benefits from those definitions? Her argument is clear: language rules are rarely about communication — they’re about control. As Thurlow and Mroczek put it, “Talk about language… is usually, at root, a matter of disciplining the bodies of speakers.”

We see this discipline everywhere. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), for example, has long been stigmatized in academic and professional spaces — even as its rhythms, slang, and structure power much of internet culture and pop music. A white influencer using AAVE-coded slang is seen as trend-savvy. A Black teen using the same language in a job interview may be labeled inarticulate or unqualified. The code hasn’t changed — only the speaker. The double standard reveals that the issue isn’t grammar. It’s race, class, and respectability politics dressed up as linguistic concern.

William Labov’s foundational work on dialect discrimination made this plain decades ago: people don’t hear “bad English” — they hear “not my kind of person.” Linguistic prejudice is social prejudice, thinly veiled. Today, that prejudice is going algorithmic. A recent study out of Stanford showed that AI detection tools — designed to spot machine-generated text — consistently flagged non-native English as “fake,” exposing how new technologies can reinforce old biases. In the rush to automate standards, we risk codifying them even more brutally.

Meanwhile, debates continue to rage over AAVE’s place in academia. Some argue for its inclusion as a legitimate dialect worthy of study and use. Others cling to the fiction that “standard English” is apolitical, universal, and ideologically pure. But as this essay has argued, there is no pure language — only power structures dressed as grammar.

So we return to the key question: Why do we celebrate TikTok slang when it’s packaged by white influencers, but punish it when it comes from the mouths of those who invented it? Why do we uphold a version of English that has historically excluded everyone but the most privileged?

Because good English isn’t just a dialect — it’s a credential. And like all credentials, it’s not distributed evenly.

What Happens When We Stop Policing the Comma? 

What might language look like if we stopped treating correctness as a proxy for worth? If we let go of the impulse to fix, to flatten, to edit people into acceptability? To imagine that future is to imagine a world where linguistic pluralism isn’t punished, but protected — where the way we speak, type, gesture, and misspell is honored not as error, but as evidence: of culture, of adaptation, of being alive in the world.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote in Decolonising the Mind that “language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.” So when we erase non-standard speech, when we sneer at emojis or penalize accents, when we treat typos as signs of failure rather than play — we’re not just enforcing taste. We’re helping erase memory.

This is not a small loss. In The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane traces how once-common nature words — acorn, otter, willow, bramble — were removed from children’s dictionaries and replaced by terms like broadband and blog. The implication was clear: words that don’t serve the market’s vision of relevance no longer belong. But what vanishes when those words disappear isn’t just vocabulary — it’s ways of seeing, knowing, belonging. Language doesn’t just describe the world. It makes it.

And so the question becomes: Could our obsession with correctness — with grammar, with polish, with propriety — actually be a form of self-erasure? A narrowing not just of expression, but of imagination?

Maybe the freedom we’re after doesn’t lie in inventing new words alone, but in loosening our grip on the old rules — the ones that told us what intelligence sounds like, what leadership looks like, what English should be. Maybe what matters most now is not what we say, but how freely we allow others to say it — especially when it looks different than we expect.

Because if language is a living technology, as Thurlow and Mroczek suggest, then the future doesn’t belong to those who preserve the code. It belongs to those who hack it — with emojis, with memes, with smol spelling and stretched-out letters and a total disregard for the comma.

What if the real power isn’t in writing perfectly — but in writing pluralistically? What if linguistic freedom means not just inventing new forms, but letting go of the idea that there’s only one right way to write at all?

The Power of a Playful Language

Language is a living technology. It stretches, mutates, resists. It responds to need, context, and culture. Its value has never come from uniformity — it comes from its expressive chaos, its improvisational genius, its ability to adapt to the pressures of time and power and people.

What we’ve been taught to call “improper” speech is often the most intimate, immediate, and emotionally legible. It’s the group chat typo that says more than a full sentence ever could. It’s the meme that makes you feel seen before you even fully understand why. It’s the emoji that softens a no, the lowercase that signals care, the stylized misspelling that says I am part of this world, and I know how to speak it.

To embrace linguistic messiness is not to abandon meaning — it’s to expand it. It’s to recognize that our grammar has always been political, our standards never neutral, and our tongues more powerful when they’re allowed to wander.

So let the comma go. Let the sentence run. Let the language shapeshift and shimmer and glitch a little. What we’re building online isn’t a broken English — it’s a new vernacular of solidarity, satire, style, and subversion.

This isn’t the end of language. It’s its next act.