Gretchen McCulloch
Ideas Contributor
Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED's Resident Linguist. She's the cocreator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, and the author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.
A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun
Let's be honest, Zoom birthdays and happy hours are bad. But an emerging type of platform known as “proximity chat” could offer a better option.
Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge
Services like Google Translate support only 100 languages, give or take. What about the thousands of other languages—spoken by people just as vulnerable to this crisis?
‘Boomerspeak’ Is Now Available for Your Parodying Pleasure
The verbal stylings of the boomer generation—dot dot dots, repeated commas, mid-sentence caps—crystallized into a distinct genre this year.
New Emoji Are So Boring—but They Don't Have to Be
A new data set on the popularity of emoji reveals a problem with Unicode's approval process, along with a way to fix it.
The Meaning of All Caps—in Texting and in Life
Emphatic caps feel like the quintessential example of internet tone of voice. Sure enough, they’ve been around since the very early days online.
Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online
Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
Coding Is for Everyone—as Long as You Speak English
Code depends on English—for reasons that are entirely unnecessary at a technical level.
Autocomplete Presents the Best Version of You
As goofy as some of your smartphone keyboard's predictions are, at least it tries to not make you look bad.
Children Are Using Emoji for Digital-Age Language Learning
When preliterate kids type strings of emoji, it may seem like a random act. But when exposed to the rhythm of texts, kids discover how to communicate.
The Widely-Spoken Languages We Still Can’t Translate Online
People who speak languages missing from Google Translate, Siri, and Wikipedia will face future crises—leaving aid organizations scrambling.
Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis
When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.