On Twitter, when a basic ha will not do, there’s constantly hahahaaaa, haaaahaaaa, or perhaps hahahahahahahahahahahahaha, showing you’ve just read the funniest thing you have actually ever seen. (Or that you’re a sarcastic talking raccoon) These are known as elastic or lengthened words, and now researchers from the University of Vermont have found out simply how prevalent they are on Twitter, revealing interesting patterns about their use.
Stretchability is a powerful linguistic device that aesthetically punches up a written word, imparting a wide range of feelings. That goes for the gooooooaaaaaaal of a soccer commentator, a teenager’s exasperated finallyyyyy, and a web surfer’s aweeeeeesome And booooy are they popular on Twitter. Writing today in the journal PLOS One, the scientists information how they combed through 100 billion tweets, mapping how often these words are extended, and how far they are elongated– haha versus hahahahaaaa, for example.
Consider dude and its lots of formulations “That can communicate essentially anything, like ‘ Duuuuude, that’s horrible,'” says University of Vermont used mathematician Peter Sheridan Dodds, among the study’s coauthors. On the other hand, “ Dude!” is different. “It could be excitement; it might be joy,” states Dodds.
But not everybody is down with utilizing exclamation marks for emphasis or emotion, including yours genuinely. “I dislike using exclamation marks due to the fact that they just do not fit my personality,” I tell Dodds and his coauthor, Chris Danforth, also an applied mathematician at University of Vermont. However I do extend words: “I have actually found myself just recently in texts to good friends or messages to coworkers doing thaaanks with 3 As, to represent some sort of enjoyment and appreciation without needing to use a dumb exclamation mark.”
” Just three?” asks Danforth. “That’s restraint. Due to the fact that 2 would not work. 2 resembles, this individual does not understand how to spell. They have actually slipped up“
All right, sooooo, we utilize stretchable words all the time to communicate additional significance– unhappiness, anger, enjoyment. And that can be particularly effective on a platform like Twitter, whose intrinsic brevity does not precisely encourage nuanced interaction. Those additional letters add some zest to a quick message, making it more eye-catching. “You’re taking what we would think of as the dictionary text and you’re turning it into something visual,” states Danforth. “It can’t be overlooked when you see 20 As in a row.”
To quantify this, Dodds, Danforth, and the lead author of the paper, University of Vermont computational linguist Tyler Gray, arbitrarily picked 10 percent of all