I'm, like, what's so special about IMing anyway?

This article from Discovery News is about some recent research into instant messaging, which has suggested that the language used is closer to spoken language than any other medium (something we commented on in this blog last August).

As well as documenting the similarities between IM chat and speech, the article talks about the 'valley girl speak' construction of I'm like, wow, and he's like, so what. Apparently this combination of the verb to be and like to mean say or think now has its own linguistic label: it's known as the quotative like.

The article is interesting because it points out that this construction is partly responsible for making a lot of IMing 'sound like' speech. Compare (as the article does) I'm, like, wow! with I thought wow!. Or she was like, hi with she said hi. The intonation differences leap out immediately.

Apparently the quotative like is spreading at speed throughout the world, and is particularly on the increase in IMing. It's going to be fascinating to see what other innovations IMing brings, and whether it truly is speeding up language change.

Out of... patience

You may have seen this little gem on the bbc website - apparently more of us are screening emails by putting our out of office notification up.
The bbc story

This doesn't work too well for me with one of my friends. As soon as she gets an 'out of office' she sends a barrage of emails asking me where I am, whether I'm really on holiday, and whether I got any of her previous emails.

It does remind me of many conversations we've had about the status of email in terms of authority and formality. We always used to rank communications in the order
speech - email - fax - letter
with speech being the least formal, and letter being the most. But I suspect that the advent of instant messaging is pushing email even nearer to speech.

(There's a lovely bit of research for someone there about how people change their language between writing emails and writing instant messages - and why, when emails are just as 'instant'.)