How The Hashtag Became Part of the #Language

As social media has risen to the heights of the zeitgeist, so has the Twitter Hashtag has become a serious part of the everyday writing experience. The 140 character limit, born of an SMS world that no longer exists, combined with the rise of 'tagging' as information demarcation and ontology has led to a digitally-driven reappraisal of one of the profundities of language. How we use nouns. Back in the day, in say 2006 and before, there were three kinds of nouns, proper nouns, regular nouns, and pronouns. To that we can now add a fourth, hashtag generated version of the noun.

The post-hoc noun. 

We all know how it works. We want to make sure everyone online knows what we're talking about, and we'd rather avoid the tedium of building a full sentence around our subject, so we write the sentence with a pronoun as subject and add the noun itself as a hashtag after the period.

For example;

Put it off all week but now I'm finally getting it done. #laundry

Often we use more than one post-hoc noun to add detail. For example

Put it off all week but now I'm finally getting it done. #laundry #laundromat

As the written word and the search for it migrates almost entirely online it's only a matter of #time before the post-hoc noun phenomenon, currently driven by Twitter usage, begins to invade every aspect of #lifeasweknowit.

I for one, will not be overwhelmed with #joy when that happens.