All Things Linguistic

This is an interesting article on the use of “slash” as a conjunction slash topic shift marker, a use which is definitely part of my idiolect. (There is also, of course, slash as in slashfic, but that’s an entirely different usage.)

Anne Curzan, the author, identifies approximately four main uses of “slash”, so I decided to search my own email corpus for examples, to add to the citable set of data on slash, and also to see how long I’ve been using it. So below is the earliest example I can find for each. 

1. Slash meaning “or”, “and”, or “and/or”. 

From a gchat in July 2006:

thanks to the genius-slash-tyrrany of the history teacher

From a gchat in February 2007:

are you watching
?
slash listening

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If you spend time on certain linguistically innovative corners of the internet, you may have noticed a new way of putting words together, with as the title suggests, exclamation marks. I’m going to call this construction exclamation!compounds, for obvious reasons. 

History of Exclamation!compounds

My first memorable encounter with exclamation!compounds came from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a webseries in which many characters act out other characters in costume theatre. When a character is acting another, the resulting character-within-a-character is referred to by exclamation!compounding maincharacter!actedcharacter. For example, Jane playing Darcy is Jane!Darcy, and likewise for Lizzie!MrsBennet and Charlotte!MrBennet. 

This Urbandictionary definition for ! suggests that exclamation!compounding originated in fanfiction. 

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Thanks to several commenters on the ok vs okay post for pointing this out, so I’m making an additional thread for this topic. I don’t think I use kay, and I think kk feels more emphatic than k. But I don’t think I can use any of them as an adjective/adverb:

*Are these pictures showing up for you k/kk? 

K is also the only one that’s good for me as a tag question: 

We’re leaving at 5, k?
*?We’re leaving at 5, kk?

But I can use both k and kk to respond affirmatively to something. 

I think there’s a distinction in use of ok vs okay in tag questions also, now that I think about it: 

We’re leaving at 5, ok? 
We’re leaving at 5, okay? 

Tag-ok is a basic check for whether the person received the question (yes-ok), whereas tag-okay feels like it is pushing them more for whether leaving at 5 is actually okay (good-okay) with them. 

Thoughts? 

I recently found myself typing “ok” and “okay” in the same utterance.

Ah ok. Are these pictures showing up for you okay? 

I’ve noticed that I use both “ok” and “okay”, but I’d thought that my choice was completely random. However, when I thought about the inverse, it felt like it meant something slightly different: 

Ah okay. Are these pictures showing up for you ok?

What? Aren’t “ok” and “okay” simply different spellings of the same word? 

So I put my linguist hat on (actually, I always have my linguist hat on) and did a search of my gmail inbox, which is the best corpus I have access to of the electronic-medium language of myself and people I talk to regularly. And I noticed some interesting trends. 

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