Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. episode 194. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And, um, and, uh, and, uh, Our guest in this episode is Gretchen McCulloch who is a linguist but also I'd say a memeologist evidenced by the fact that in her New York Times best-selling book,

because internet, understanding the new rules of language,

she spends a good portion of the book tracing the history of memes and how we have used them all the way up to right now, which is part of her overall exploration of how language itself has changed and evolved and expanded and grown and exploded and

become weird and mutated with the advent of text messaging snapping, tick-talk

emoies, gifts, memes, and the internet as a whole.

And yes, no cap, it is pronounced gift, don't at me.

McCulloch says language is, quote,

humanity's most spectacular open source project in the internet is making our

language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. And that's true,

I agree. She's also the host of a podcast called Ling-Thusiasm, a

podcast for language enthusiasts like herself, like me perhaps like you and I

highly recommend it. This is one of those episodes where we just talk and the topics

range all over from fax machine culture to meme ecosystems to slang to riffing on shared cultural

contexts, how the poop emoji was invented, and which by

the way is a story that includes engineers who got together and chose the poop emoji

as the best way to express something very specific

that before required full sentences to get across to somebody across text.

And overall we're going to discuss the way that language has expanded to express our shared and evolving humanity in new ways.

And we can now use all of these tools to move from one head to another aspects of the human experience as a whole in new and more specific detail.

If you still put periods at the end of your text and refuse to change your ways, you will definitely enjoy this interview.

And if you fancy yourself some kind of meme lord, well, this is certainly the episode for you.

Also, you will hear us reference some internet trends that have

...