One of the more intriguing aspects of a typed medium consisting of billions of words is the use of deliberate misspellings to signify a particular tone.
Take the jocular formulation interwebs, often combined with teh to give “teh interwebs.” Typically, it’s used by those who think of themselves as digitally experienced to poke fun at the supposed naivety of those who aren’t—who might, for example, consider calling the internet the “interweb,” a conflation of “internet” and “World Wide Web.”
As a comical term, interweb is a child of the mid-2000s; as a science fiction term, speculatively describing the connection of multiple internets across different planets, it dates back at least to a 1994 episode of the television series Babylon 5, an origin that may well have helped convince the unwitting that it did in fact describe something real.102
The history of the plural form, though, adds another layer to the joke, invoking a specific incident during the US presidential campaign in 2000 when George W. Bush described during a public debate the idea that “we can have filters on internets” as a measure against pornography and violence.103
Saying “the internets” rapidly became a knowing way of poking fun at those seeking to discuss technology without necessarily understanding it; combining it with online culture’s fondness for whimsical typos like “teh” augmented the gag further, as does the occasional habit of (mis) spelling “interwebs” as “interwebz” or even “intarwebz.”
Misspellings and substitutions for comic effect are nothing new, of course—in 1775 the playwright Richard Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop gave her name (a malapropism) to the unintentional misuse of one similar-sounding word for another.
Online, though, rampant and systematic misspelling is above all a visual gag, rooted in the specific mechanics of a keyboard—something that draws extensively on the trends and codes outlined in this book’s earlier entry on “leetspeak.” In everyday online usage perhaps the closest historical analog to teh internets and friends is writers’ use of “eye dialect.” This phrase was coined in 1925 by the American professor of English George Philip Krapp to describe the use of unusual spellings in fiction to convey the fact that a character was speaking strangely, but without making any attempt actually to write out their dialect phonetically.104
An eye dialect, in other words, is a form of writing aimed at the readers’ eye rather than ear. It signals difference and idiosyncrasy in an efficient, comprehensible way—such as in Mark Twain’s use of the spelling “wuz” instead of “was” for some of his characters—without demanding a perhaps hard-to-read transcription of the precise sound of speech itself.
The internet is, in this sense, the apogee of eye dialects, with its plethora of terms and typos aimed entirely at the eye—and echoing not speech, but the conversational deployment of a clacking keyboard.