Texting is a pain in the neck

‘Would you believe, looking down at your phone can put about 60lb of force on your neck,’ wrote Dr Miriam Stoppard in the Mirror. ‘Lift your phone up to eye level to avoid text neck.’ I didn’t quite understand about the 60lb, but my husband tells me there are other text ailments, notably text claw, a pain in the hand and wrist from too much tippety-tapping with the thumb. Apparently rolling cigars can have the same effect. I wonder if Carmen suffered from it.

But another pain from texting comes from the formation of the past tense. ‘I text you yesterday but I never heard back,’ people say. It ‘sounds right’ to them, because text resembles other past tenses such as vexed, boxed, axed. Speakers prefer not to add a suffix to make it texted, which sounds to them as erroneous as vexeded.

It is now 20 years since the OED caught up with the verb text, as I mentioned here in 2018. The earliest citation comes from 1998. Yet the verb was around 400 years ago, meaning ‘to write in clear letters’. In 1624, Thomas Heywood, in an energetic 466-page folio called Gynaikeion, on strong women in history, includes a traveller’s tale from Russia, where it was so cold that ‘our words still as we spoke them, froze before us in the ayre, and that so hard, that such as the next day past that way, might read them as perfectly and distinctly as if they had beene texted in Capitall Letters’. I remembered something similar in Baron Munchausen, the collection of tall tales written in English by the German Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785. By good fortune, I’ve just found that Baldassare Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier (1528) tells of Muscovite merchants shouting over a river, but the words freezing and having to be thawed out by lighting a fire.