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Short and sweet

Andrew Roberts

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Lloyd Evans on the great texting debate

What do you make of this texting business? It took me on a surprisingly complex journey. First I felt revulsion, then doubt set in, then I sensed a developing acceptance and finally I embraced it with utilitarian enthusiasm. At one point I was even touched by a Shavian zeal that texting might usher in a new universal shorthand which would simplify and accelerate communication. Not that I wanted conventional spellings eradicated. A word’s spelling is an encryption of its history. But I was tempted by the prospect of an alternative orthography so we cd typ thgs lke ths 2 ch othr. It’s doubtful this will ever happen as David Crystal’s entertaining book argues. The emergence of texting was greeted by hysteria in the press. ‘Bleak bald bad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk,’ huffed the Guardian in 2002. Others worried that texting would ‘rape’ the language. Certainly its popularity took everyone by surprise and the market is now worth over $700 bn dollars a year, three times the box office receipts for Hollywood movies. It appeals because it combines several virtues at once. It’s quick, instant, intimate, succinct and cheap. You can text in circumstances averse to any other form of communication, in a thumping nightclub or ‘whilst holding on to the roof-strap of a crowded bus’.

According to Sandra Barron of the New York Times, texts have the immediacy of a phone call, the convenience of an answering machine message and the premeditation of email. And if they happen to be from a crush and pop up late at night they have the giddy readability of a note left on a pillow.

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