Txtng: the Gr8 Db8

The text message has added a new facet to the age-old issue of correct English usage. The writer John Sutherland has translated some Shakespeare plays into text messages, but commented that it was 'like playing Beethoven on the kazoo'. Much has been said and written about the effect of texting on spelling, but erratic spelling is far from new: A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh admitted 'My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places'. Meanwhile Dickens' Sam Weller took a more robust view: '"Do you spell it with a 'V' or a 'W'?" inquired the judge. "That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord," replied Sam'.

Problems with nineteenth-century technical improvements in communication defeated Henry James: 'I am trying to make use of an accursed "fountain" pen - but it's a vain struggle, it beats me', while in the 1940s the humorist Robert Benchley thought that 'The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon'. But Marshall McLuhan told the 60s that 'The medium is the message'.

Many complain about the effect of texting on grammar. In the eighteenth century the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson wrote 'I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations', but by the early 1900s the Fowlers were advising in their classic The King's English: 'Prefer geniality to grammar'.

Shortening words has a long history, and the American writer Mark Twain had a very practical approach, 'I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same money for cop'.

Certainly any form of language will only survive if it enables people to communicate, and while Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty may have had a point: '"When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less"', still, this was no help to Alice. The last word should perhaps belong to Wittgenstein: 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world'.

In Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, David Crystal, the world's best known linguist, takes a hard look at texting and comes up with some surprising and controversial conclusions.

Printer friendly version