Melville House Books

Texting: Killing the language in more ways than one

Admit it: The kind of shorthand being used in text messaging that used to make you — Mr. and Ms. Literary Type Person — cringe is now something you are using less and less begrudgingly. You’ve actually texted that person waiting for you in the restaurant, “C u there!” haven’t u?

So what the hell does this mean for mother English? As Ammon Shea writes in a New York Times Magazine “On Language” column, “There is a long and noble history of trying to change the English language’s notoriously illogical system of spelling,” with efforts from notable Americans stretching from Benjamin Franklin to Teddy Roosevelt. Noah Webster, with his early, mega-successful dictionary of American English, “managed to forever make Americans view the British honour and theatre as off-kilter,” i.e., “to change -our to -or and -re to -er.” And yet Webster “was noticeably less successful in convincing Americans of the utility of many of his other ideas, like spelling oblique as obleek, machine as masheen and prove as proov.”  In short, “Although this issue has been extensively studied and argued over by these and other eminent thinkers, there has been an almost complete lack of success in effecting any substantial progress.”

And so, says Ammon, “it is rather bizarre that the first widespread change in how people spell English words appears to have come from a group of (largely) young people sending text messages …. Why have such inadvertent “reforms†succeeded where generations of dedicated intellectual attempts have not? And will they last?”

Some of the experts Ammon approaches for an opinion essentially run away screaming. But others are interesting. Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 author David Crystal says “there’s nothing in texting to suggest spelling reform†because “texting relies heavily on abbreviations, which he sees as creative stylings, not systematic improvements,” and in fact many of texting’s abbreviations have (“btwn” for “between”) have been around a long time. And Naomi Baron, a linguistics prof and author of Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, says ‘“textisms’ will stop growing as people continue to develop more proficiency in using handheld devices and as the devices continue to grow more sophisticated than simple telephone touch pads.”

Crystal makes perhaps the most interesting observation: “People who try to impose reform ‘top down’ rarely succeed. But a ‘bottom up’ movement might well have some permanent effects.â€

Of course, that would mean texting is indeed a “bottom up” movement.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.