‘Is that a thing?’ for ‘does that exist?’
Deliberate omission of grammar to show e.g. defeatedness, bewilderment, fury. As seen in Tumblr’s ‘what is this I don’t even’.
‘Because [noun]’. As in ‘we couldn’t have our picnic in the meadow because wasps.’
Use of kerning to indicate strong bewilderment, i.e. double-spaced letters usually denoting ‘what is happening?’ This one is really interesting because it doesn’t really translate well to speech. It’s something people have come up with that uses the medium of text over the internet as a new way of communicating instead of just a transcript of speech or a quicker way to send postal letters.
Just the general playing around with sentence structure and still being able to be understood. One of my favourites of these is the ‘subject: *verbs* / object: *is verb*’ couplet, as in:
Beekeeper: *keeps bees*
Bees: *is keep*
or
Me: *holds puppy*
Puppy: *is hold*
I just love how this all develops organically with no deciding body, and how we all understand and adapt to it.
THIS IS SO COOL
I love all of these
although oddly I associate all of them with Tumblr/the internet/the last couple of years except the first? I’ve been using “is that a thing” for at least five years: it was in common use at my high school back before any of us spent much time on the internet
actually I have a great linguistics memory associated with it
someone made some reference to Jennifer Lawrence doing something in 2008 and I responded “did Jennifer Lawrence even exist then?” intending that in a sort of figurative way to mean something like “was she famous” or “did the phenomenon of Jennifer Lawrence exist,” since obviously she had been born at that point
and my 10-year-old sister looked at me in puzzlement and corrected, “you mean she existed, she just wasn’t a thing.”