“Can a dog be twins?” So reads the meme, a tweet composed by the nameless heroine, five words that soon go viral. Global. “The post had recently reached the stage of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember ‘Can a dog be twins?’ instead of the date of The Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.”
Some of the new emojis available. Credit:Unicode Consortium
The heroine hails from Patricia Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus, 2021). A maverick mosaic, the book shadows our vaunted ‘poster girl’ through real life and ‘portal’ life, from bedroom to chatroom, all distinctions blurring into a single on-life of likers and followers.
Lockwood, an American poet, has a rare gift for phrasing. Cancel culture gains real lustre in her hands: “Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, towards a new person to hate.”
Likewise, the gnaw of web addiction: “this metastasis of the word next, the word more.”
Her humour is equally wild. Take the emoji-blindness of her mother, who sends recipe texts that read like porn. The daughter has to pounce. “NEVER SEND ME THE EGGPLANT AGAIN MOM, she texted. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’RE COOKING FOR DINNER!”
Any book dealing with the net is about communication. More than Beowulf or the telephone, the web is reshaping English. Gretchen McCulloch, a Montreal linguist and author of Because Internet (Riverhead, 2019), attributes the impact to “weak ties”, where a tribe’s cohort of adjacent outsiders relay new grammar to distant platforms.
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That’s the net, in a nutshell. Each post we send, each quip we share, is a raindrop striking the big pond’s surface, dimpling and radiating from my space to yours. At one point in Lockwood’s novel, the heroine is feted at a literary festival, thanks to her “doggerel”. She shares a panel debating which is funnier: sneezing or sneazing.
Tellingly, even in chatrooms, such slang-centred discussions seldom occur, usurped by adoption instead. As Lockwood writes: “Spellings of the word baby that the portal had lately cycled through: babey, babby, bhabie. Middle English had seen similar transformations: babe, babe, babi. Yet in every variation, the meaning shone through, as durable as a soul, wrapped in swaddling clothes.”
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