On­line, hash­tags are every­where. Soon enough, they’ll be com­pletely ubiq­ui­tous.

That’s fine and all. It’s not the point.

The point is: some peo­ple use #hash­tags in every­day con­ver­sa­tion.

Ver­bal con­ver­sa­tion.

Imag­ine some­one say­ing out-loud: “My lap­tops just died. Both of them. Again. Hash­tag first­world­prob­lems.”

Now imag­ine that they aren’t quot­ing a tweet.

Some peo­ple ac­tu­ally do this.

And it is­n’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing.

Hash­tags and their uses

On­line, hash­tags are a way of writ­ing meta–that is, writ­ing about writ­ing. For in­stance, in tweets like this one:

My lap­tops just died. Both of them. Again. #first­world­prob­lems

The #first­world­prob­lems hash­tag does­n’t de­scribe the lap­tops dy­ing. It does­n’t de­scribe them dy­ing a­gain. It de­scribes the com­plaint about them dy­ing.

In Ye Olde Eng­lish of 2000, one might have writ­ten:

My lap­tops just died. Both of them. Again. Even when lucky enough to have two lap­tops, I still strug­gle. Irony.

Yet even that does­n’t meet the full depth of hash­tags.

Hash­tags be­come their own lan­guage–or, at least, vo­cab­u­lary. Hash­tags be­come memes, and in so do­ing, get ex­tra mean­ing and con­text at­tached to them.

Each time they are used, this at­tached mean­ing is re­in­forced.

What if you did­n’t say the word “hash­tag” out loud?

What if these an­noy­ing hash­tag-ver­bal­iz­ers did­n’t say:

My lap­tops just died. Both of them. Again. Hash­tag first­world­prob­lems.

But in­stead just said:

My lap­tops just died. Both of them. Again. First world prob­lems.

That is, what would hap­pen if they dropped the word “Hash­tag?”

The prob­lem is that the very word “Hash­tag” car­ries some mean­ing. It means: “I’m com­ment­ing on what I just said.”

By ver­bal­iz­ing hash­tags, you can self-edit your­self, and make it clear that self-edit­ing is what you are do­ing.

If you don’t ver­bal­ize “hash­tag,” you leave the self-edit­ing na­ture am­bigu­ous, and lose the mean­ing at­tached to the word “hash­tag” it­self.

That be­ing said…

Even though ver­bal­iz­ing “hash­tag” ap­pears to make some sense log­i­cally… I hate it.

Please don’t.

An al­ter­na­tive that may not be so both­er­some and may make more sense: a new lan­guage syn­tax fea­ture to in­di­cate meta-ness. “Hash­tag” is a full word, and two syl­la­bles at that.

Very obru­sive. Use spar­ingly.