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Evaluation of Gretchen McCulloh’s Article A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.

Gretchen McCulloh, as she introduces herself on her website, is an internet linguist. She published numerous articles about language usage on the internet, including essays about emojis and about the youth’s slang. Her writing style represents her attitude towards her profession, it is enjoyable, however, and as she mentioned in her website, it is written for a general audience.

In this article, McCulloh investigates the origin and the usage of the popular meme, the “doge”, and its companion the “doge” speech.

The title of the article, A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge.Wow., gives us an insight of the writing’s wording, and it really fits the conclusion. Speaking of conclusion, she uses a great technique of catching the reader’s attention, as the thesis statement appears in the last paragraph. By this, she builds up a tension and encourages readers to read the entire essay. Interestingly, her paragraphs are divided by titles, that are usually questions and are answered in the particular section.

            The essay is well-structured as in the beginning she gives us an explanation of the meme and what it stands for. In The introduction, pictures are provided in order to totally understand the topic of the writing. To support her idea of the doge being an online phenomenon, she shows Tumblr threads and Facebook comments, which is a validation of her claim, since it appeared only a few years ago on the internet.

            After the general introduction she raises a linguistic question, that is how come the language of the doge is so distinguishable.  She calls this set of words “doge phrases”. She investigates and gives us a list of these “doge phrases” and names the general characteristic features of such expressions. After that, she explains what makes recognizable a doge phrase. Her argument is validated with numerous examples and linguistic explanations. She does not bring her own linguistic ideas, but already existing methods.

            In the last but one paragraph, the origins of the doge phrases are under investigation.  She states that psychological factors play a big role, and mentions, for instance, babytalk. Babytalk highly correlates with the doge language, she states, and supports her claim with another article about babytalk. The other factor that is mentioned is the way people communicate via the internet, sentence structures are changing, and grammatical rules are shifting. She juxtaposes the previous online tendencies with the contemporary and states a big difference. While the previous online generation played with spelling (she mentions „C U L8R” for example), the contemporary online community plays with grammar (In the case of doge phrases, “many happy”). The conclusion repeats the idea of how the new generation of internet language has appeared, what is more, how it changed our perception of humans and in this case, animals.

            All in all, the article was enjoyable to read which can result from the fact, that it was written in a pleasant style. Nevertheless, the language of the article was informal in some instances, but since the topic is indeed about how our use of language changes, it is acceptable. All the claims she made were supported, either with links to other websites, or with inner explanations. Fitting the topic, this article is more enjoyable on a computer, as interesting websites are presented for those who seek more doge-related content.

(584 words)

Works cited

McCulloh, Gretchen. “A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge.Wow.” The Toast, 6 February 2014,  http://the-toast.net/2014/02/06/linguist-explains-grammar-doge-wow/ Accessed 10 Dec., 2016.