The New Vocabulary

No, not Twittersqueak. Animated gifs. At the moment they're not even pronounceable, let alone spellable, making an new challenge for lexicography unique in the entire history of the recorded word, but they're fast becoming ubiquitous and indispensible as the letter "e" in english in the fastest growing written medium: lit electrons.

It will be fascinating to watch the progression of the synthesis of moving pictures into written exposition, especially since in many ways the transmission of ideas is much more rapid through written word than by video. It's why novels are still a billion dollar business a whole century after the advent of practical motion photography; we often go pick up the novel AFTER seeing the movie to enjoy a richer experience of the story. Well, some of us, anyway.

The trend is still nascent: most gifs are still being used as a sort of punctuation or footnote rather than replacing words or phrases in the main text, but that's only because they're new and we haven't gotten totally comfortable with handling them as a primary textual element. That'll change quickly.

In one sense it's a regression toward the ancient oriental written language of thousands of glyphs - only with punch, and in living color.

But it means permanent records will need a source of power to keep those electrons lit, even in repose on zip drives or whatever else gets invented to archive things, and not just power but the means to correctly read the excited electrons, years and decades and centuries after the device that created them has crumbled into obsolescence.

Pen and acid-free paper has no such problem - but once animated gifs become entrenched in written language, irreplaceable as vowels, all the pens and reams of paper on earth become useless as a 1922 Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

Just how do you spell or pronounce:violin:anyway?