Texting

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 2/13/03 3:02:58 PM Eastern Standard Time,
vidamorkunas at TELUS.NET quotes:

> Text messaging, which abbreviates most words to fit onto the small screens
>  typical of cell phones (examples -- BTW for "by the way" and PXT for
"please
>  explain that"), has spawned a new language,

Bah, humbug.  "Text messaging" or "texting" is neither a new language, nor a
display of ignorance, nor substandard, nor a threat to proper English.  It is
merely a fashionable spelling convention.

It isn't even anything new.  Consider the following 18th Century example of
texting, due to Fredriech der Grosse and his penpal Francois-Marie Arouet:

         P                  C
     je vais     a      sans

and the answer

      J a

(Translation:  Je vais souper a Sans Souci ("I am going to eat at Sans
Souci");
                    J'ai grand apetit ("I have a big appetite" or "I'm quite
hungry")

or the following English-language address

       Wood
         ~
       Ohio

(translation at end of this post)

More serious examples include something called (I think) "Notehand", which I
saw in the early 1960's, which was a systematic set of abbreviations for
common letter strings such as ."..tion", for the purpose of being able to
take lecture notes faster and more efficiently.

For many years "computer terminal" meant "Model 33 Teletype".  The
once-ubiquitous Model 33 had a keyboard with a sledgehammer touch which put a
premium on using as few keystrokes as possible.  (Those kids trying to type
text into their cell phone keypads have no idea what their parents' fingers
went through with the Model 33.)  The UNIX operating system was designed
around the Model 33, hence the plethora of baffling one- and two-letter
instruction codes (which inspired the similar codes of MS-DOS).

For comparison, there exists an opposite of scripting, in the
Alfa-Bravo-Charlie phonetic alphabet, in which each letter is replaced by a
usually-two-syllable word.  For years there was an office which I called at
least once a day and identified myself to as "Juliet Lima from Eisenhower
Avenue" (they had to log all calls by the caller's initials and location).

If you want something that IS a "new language" or at least a perversion of
the existing language, try the various flavors of telegraphese.  Or newspaper
headlines: "Texting Ruins Queen's English; Experts Vow Fight" in which the
DESCRIPTION of the cure is far worse than the disease.

What I consider an abomination is the free use of smileys (no relation to
George Smiley of my favorite John Le Carre novels).  If I have to employ a :)
to tell my correspondents that I am being facetious, then there is something
wrong with my writing and I would be better advised to erase the message and
start over again using proper, standard English.

        - James A. Landau
          systems engineer
          FAA Technical Center (ACB-510/BCI)
          Atlantic City Int'l Airport NJ 08405 USA  (who still owns two slide
rules)




Answer:  Mark Underwood, Andover Ohio