Txt 4 U
One of the less desirable effects of modern technology has come from SMS texting with mobile telephones. I have no problem with texting per se – I do so myself, and keep in touch with some friends that way – but the shorthand used by many people is, I fear, doing terrible things to their capacity to express themselves in an articulate way in writing.
People sometimes suggest to me that this is just part of the nostalgia that comes with growing older – that Shakespeare would have been horrified if he had been able to read Jane Austen and would have found her style to be lamentable – and that therefore texting is nothing other than the new mode of communication and that we should be making the best of it. I don’t think so. I don’t look forward to billions of Chinese learning to use txt English and for it to become the lingua franca of the world.
But then again, maybe I am just getting old… Or possibly even 2 old. That would not be so gr8.
July 2, 2008 at 11:02 am
Hi!
I too find it a shame that this new version of English (and also Portuguese, don’t know about other languages…) used in SMS texting seems to be expanding to email, blogs and I do fear that soon it will be the norm other than the variant. What can be done to prevent this? I don’t know. I remember our Cultural Studies class in University and the teacher saying that Esperanto never “caught on” because it’s not linked to a culture, and that a language only survives if it’s linked to a culture. So maybe we can’t stop textish (as my fiancee calls it) from taking over…
July 3, 2008 at 11:30 am
I had no idea that ‘textish’ is used in other languages as well. Oh dear. It might be interesting to speculate, if textish is anchored in a culture, what that culture might look like beyond just language. Frightening, really.
July 4, 2008 at 8:11 am
Frightening indeed!
thought I’d let you know so you can use it safely!
Just one PS I had to add, my fiancée copyrighted textish, so we will have to refer to Thomas Franey when using that term
July 4, 2008 at 9:05 am
All future references will be to ‘textish’ (© Thomas Franey)
July 4, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Lord, God, this reads like the Monty Python sketch about “young people” not having to work “down t’mine”, etc…
Languages and their presentation evolve and are constantly in flux, reacting to the needs of society, economics and technology. Viz: The Azeri language officially changed to a Latin-based written form from a Cyrillic one. Turkey “modernised” the official Turkish alphabet to be in line with the political direction of the state. The German government instituted a spelling reform a few years ago, the Dutch did something similar, and in the last couple of weeks a new German capital letter appeared (http://www.multilingualblog.com). Japanese computer users use a regular keyboard with an input method editor (IME) software, typing their words phonetically before they are entered correctly in Kanji characters. QWERTY keyboards only exist in English because that layout originally solved a mechanical problem on early typewriters. And so on.
Text messaging’s truncated, phonetic, semi-WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style is as much a response to the limitations of the device’s input mechanism and user interface display as the fact that people are too busy to write properly these days. However, if it helps people to communicate with each other, what is wrong with that? Text messaging is certainly more intelligible or recognisable than the English used in Finnegan’s Wake!
The anti-TXT language argument are very similar to those levelled against Ebonics (in which I be fluent, having lived in San Francisco Bay Area for years). However, Ebonics (or African American Vernacular English) was recognised by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1997 as being systematic and rule-governed “like all natural speech varieties”. They argued that to characterise Ebonics as “slang”, “mutant”, “lazy”, “defective”, “ungrammatical”, or “broken English” was incorrect and demeaning.
I would argue that text messaging is being analysed out of context and is also being incorrectly judged AGAIN.
Y’all Dig?