How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph) or (Feed Chatter #.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I tried to tell myself that being here was not re: sleeping but re: being with your friends and doing great stuff. (2.4)
The lingo of the feed is so pervasive that Titus even thinks like email—"re" meaning "concerning."
Quote #2
For awhile we played a game with the ball, and we were twirling all over the place, and we were like, what it's called when you skim really close over the surface of something, we were that to the floor, with our arms out... (2.15)
Titus, we think the word you're looking for is "glide." You were gliding on the floor. As we see in other places in the book, Titus and his friends don't have to think much about their language, because the feed will step in and offer them the word they're looking for. Thanks, feed! Sometimes we wish someone would do that for us.
Quote #3
She smirked. "Oh, mmm-hm," she said. "You put the 'supper' back in 'suppuration.'"
Link thought that was hilarious. Of course, he didn't have any idea what the hell she was talking about either, but he started laughing while the rest of us were still looking up "suppuration" on the feed English-to-English wordbook. (4.32-33)
Whoa, Violet! Check out how she uses one mighty long word here—four whole syllables, which Titus and his friends have to look it up in the "English-to-English wordbook" a.k.a. dictionary. Seems that English has become a foreign language even to its native speakers.
Quote #4
"You broke off a... a thing," said Marty. "You broke off a f***in' thing."
"A caster," I said.
"Caster," said Link, pointing at my nose. "Good one."
You know your break sucks when the most brag part of the night is you coming up with the word "caster." (5.20-23)
"Thing" becomes a catch-all term for pretty much any object the speaker is talking about. Titus shows that he may be just a micrometer above the rest of his friends with his ability to supply "caster." (Actually, it's pretty impressive: we had to look that up in our English-to-English wordbook.)
Quote #5
"She's like, whoa, she's like so stressed out. This is... Dude," he said. "Dude, this is some way bad s***." (13.7)
Check out how even Titus's high-powered and profesh dad uses debased, slangy language. Are there any differences between Titus's language use and his dad's?
Quote #6
"It's like..." I said. "It's like a squid in love with the sky."
...
She rubbed my head, and she went, "You're the only one of them that uses metaphor." (15.9-10)
Violet's eyes get all starry here, when Titus shows that he has marginally more ability to put words together than his friends. We get it. She's not the first person to make bad romantic decisions based on the way someone puts words together. Ahem.
Quote #7
In there, there were nurses and the doctor and the technician. The nurses were watching the relays, our blood pressure and all. They were like, "Don't worry about anything. You'll feel it all coming back in a few seconds." The doctor touched a bootstick to my head.
He said, "Okay. Could we like get a thingie, a reading on his limbic activity?" (17.5-6)
Even among doctors—hopefully highly-trained professionals—language is noticeably degraded. "Thingie" probably not something you want to hear out of your surgeon's mouth when undergoing the delicate repair to something linked into your brain.
Quote #8
"The sarcasm of my daughter notwithstanding, it is nonetheless an occasion of great moment to meet one of her erotic attachments. In the line of things, she has not brought them home, but has chosen instead to conduct her trysts at remote locales, perhaps beach huts or oxygen-rich confabularies." (28.10)
Whoa there, Mr. Durn. We know you're a professor and all, but this is some seriously complex verbiage. His use of more complex language is just one way Violet's dad tries to resist the feed and its dumbing down of American society.
Quote #9
"He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says." (28.23)
Huh. It sounds like Violet's dad's strategy of using words to avoid being dumbed down is similar to Violet's own desire to be invisible to the feed. Like father, like daughter.
Quote #10
Marty had also gotten a Nike speech tattoo, which was pretty brag. It meant that every sentence, he automatically said "Nike." He paid a lot for it. It was hilarious, because you could hardly understand what he said anymore. It was just, "This f***in' s*** Nike, f***in', you know Nike," etc. (55.3)
Game over, people. You know it's bad when you can't even understand what someone's saying because it's just babbled nonsense, with a few free commercial endorsements thrown in. Nike should have paid him.