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Sunday 7 September 2008

Short and sweet

Lloyd Evans on the great texting debate

What angered the press and its tribe of reactionaries was the multiple use of abbreviations in text messages. But there’s nothing novel, let alone scary, about shortening phrases like, for example, Rest in Peace and so on. I could have written the last eight words, ‘eg RIP etc’ and no one would have broken into a sweat. The much-vaunted panic about schoolkids quoting Hamlet with ‘2b or nt 2b’ also turns out to be groundless, partly because these abbreviations save negligible quantities of energy, and partly because texting exists only because it varies from the established conventions in ways that are entirely predictable. Far from being a playground for lazy half-wits, texting is a self-contained and highly conventional idiom that has stimulated fresh forms of expression. There’s no chance that it could become viral and destroy the language. And having defused that time bomb, Crystal sets off on a pleasing tour of the highways and byways of texting. Abbreviations aren’t used by all texters. The Samaritans receive SMS messages from depressives, ‘H8 my lyf. Hav 0 m8s. Wnt 2 di’, and they reply using ‘full English spelling’ to avoid misunderstandings.

GBS would have enjoyed texting. Martin Amis is a fan and deployed texts to great comic effect in his novel Yellow Dog. And Evelyn Waugh left evidence that, given the chance, he’d have texted like a hoodie on crack. Here’s a telegram to his agent refusing an interview with an impoverished broadcaster. ‘BBC LSD NBG EW.’

Crystal is a sophisticated, open-minded tour guide but even he rambles a little. The book closes with a 40-page texting dictionary aimed at a rather improbable range of international emergencies. Got a date with Claudia Schiffer? Text ‘bbb’, a German abridgement of ‘see you later, baby’. Had a bust-up with your Welsh grandmother? Send ‘cdb9’, which means ‘Shut up, Gran’. Or if you wake up with amnesia in Prague surrounded by monoglot Czechs you’ll be able to text your carers with ‘csdd hosipa,’ which means ‘this is unavoidable but I can’t remember anything’. Don’t forget that.

More articles from: Andrew Roberts | this section

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