Texting

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:56 PM -0500 2/13/03, James A. Landau wrote:
>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")...

Very nice.  And, as I noted a while ago, there's also a nice parallel
with the trendy use of "laconics" back in the 1830's that gave us
"OK" from "oll korrect", inter alia, as detailed in Allen Walker
Read's work.  Contemporary newspaper critics caviled at the
"cabalistic" practices of the day, which included similar intentional
misspellings and pseudo-illiteracies to what we find being used now.
Some of the examples Read cites directly prefigure SMS/texting
practice, including one instance of alphanumeric mixing:

"To Miss Catherine Jay, of Utica" (1832):

Oh KTJ is far B4
All other maids IC;
Her XLNC I adore
As a lovely NTT.

(I tried searching both Making of America archives for other
occurrences of B4 'before', but without success.)

larry


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