Bookish Thoughts

It's been years since the-toast shuttered, but back when they were still posting (and I was reading) every day, I loved Gretchen McCulloch's column , in which she analyzed internet slang as a linguist. When the site went down, I lost track of McCulloch (and a handful of other people whose writing I always looked forward to). Happily, she didn't go far. She has her own blog , a column at Wired , and now a book! It took the book release for her to come back on my radar, but now I'm looking forward to reading more about the rise of casual written language and how it interacts with the rest of life. Like all of her writing, this book as a ton of fun to read while also being incredibly informative and helping me shed my prejudices about the evolution of language. It helps that I can easily see myself in the pages (I'm a Full Internet Person, tyvm), and I actually remember a lot of history McCulloch goes through, from early chat rooms and AIM through the proliferation o...

Sometimes the best thing you can say about a book is that it's short. This is another book that I should have just walked away from in the first 50 pages. But I keep finding myself in these obligation situations where I feel like I owe it to someone else to finish reading a book. Like I said, at least this one was short. This book is all about communication and the ways that misunderstandings and arguments can arise from a simple mismatch in communication style. Pauses that are too long or too short. Expecting to engage in a negotiation versus getting right to the point. Too much or too little focus on body language and tone. Ironically, I had serious issues with the author's style. The information in here is interesting. But it's also dated and the book feels anecdotal. The author is a professor of linguistics, so I'm sure she has done a lot of research along with her own studies. But there's no mention of methodology. Just countless of examples of people faili...