holy shit, you guys, i just had the most exciting breakthrough on what the fuck is happening with the playful manipulation, deconstruction, and recombination of language you see on tumblr and twitter. like i’ve been chewing on this for years: is it post-modernism? is it post-structuralism? is it absurdism? is it surrealism?
it’s cubism.
“In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.[6]” (wikipedia)
look at birds_rights, fruitsoftheape100, or rate-my-reptile. it’s not simply oversimplified grammar like lolcats. every sentence is set up to fully convey meaning, but in as absurd a jumble as possible. like this birds_rights tweet:
“hi Merica. I know it your birtday. But maybe you can a little less TRY TO EXPLOSION ME OUT OF THE SKY???? Thank.”
or a rate-my-reptile comment:
“EXCUSE ma, lamma go!!! Got get to to work! Gots a interviu, and a Jobberpumpipty!9.6271/10 Babbie Businis is Still.. Busness!(try a not hold lizats by they tails! but, just a touche is usual fine tho!)”
see, you know what they’re saying, but if you sat down to mark what was formally wrong it’d be exactly like trying to redline the anatomy of a woman in a picasso painting: rendering a clear communication of a single thing, at a single point, from a single perspective isn’t the priority.
“Aimed at a large public, [Salon Cubists’] works stressed the use of multiple perspective and complex planar faceting for expressive effect while preserving the eloquence of subjects endowed with literary and philosophical connotations.[4]” (wikipedia)
every part of rate-my-reptile’s post is being approached from a different grammatical angle, but it’s ungrammatical in a different way each time. and then you have the employment of misspellings, typos, and melodious abstraction, respectively ‘lamma’, ‘interviu’ , and ‘jobberpumpipty’
