Sam Biddle, “How the Hashtag Is Ruining the English Language” (Gizmodo, Dec. 28, 2011)
The hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence, a like yknowwwww that now permeates the internet outside of the tweets it was meant to corral. It pervades Facebook, texting, Foursquare—turning into a form of “ironic metadata,” as linguist Ben Zimmer of The Visual Thesaurus labels it.
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