The Atlantic has a phenomenal ability to take something kind of interesting (trends in language, slang, and culture via social media) and write about it in the worst way possible
Like, I think it is kind of interesting to talk about how the Internet has eroded the boundaries between subcultures in a way that causes a lot of creativity and enjoyment, but also flattens out cultural diversity.
But he's just kind of mumbling through it.
Agree completely. Pre-internet, slang was fairly soloed between demos, but now everyone even across languages is kind of speaking 'net. I find that fascinating, but I never considered the "main function of slang to signal group membership."
Yeah there's a real shift here! I've noticed gay slang migrating to straight people way faster than it ever did before. But this guy doesn't manage to say anything interesting about it and calling slang "insidious" just utterly disqualifies the entire piece.
Yeah the actual interesting article would be about the speed of the new pipelines, how much this is reflected in information transmission generally, and where the silos do actually still exist.
(Also would be interested to see if we are sort of... circling back to old slang quicker)
