I am teaching two classes this month, Literature of the Holocaust and Freshman Composition. It’s an interesting combination, since the Holocaust literature class focuses on the use of language to make art, and therefore a kind of beauty, out of content that is anything but conventionally beautiful and the freshman composition class is focused on helping students learn how to use language precisely and persuasively, without being focused on the mastery of a particular content. I’ve decided I want to spend some time this summer blogging about the readings I assign in these classes and the discussions we have about them.
The first essay I have asked my composition class to read is “2b or Not 2b?” by David Crystal, a defense of texting not just as a means of communication, but as “language in evolution.” Crystal starts out by quoting John Humphrys who, in an essay called “I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language,” wrote that people who text are “vandals…doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.” Humphrys, of course, is not alone in feeling this way, though is expression of contempt may be a bit extreme. My colleagues and I complain often about how frequently the language of texting finds its way into the essays students write for us, substituting the letter u for you, the number 2 for to, two, or too, and I even had one student who, in a literary analysis, kept referring to “the txt of the poem.” Oddly enough, my students tend to be no less critical. During the pre-reading discussion we had today, more than a few of them suggested that people who use texting abbreviations do so because they are lazy; one woman admitted that she’d stopped using abbreviations in her texts because she started using them in formal writing without even realizing it; and we had a small debate about whether the language of texting is indeed “dumbing down the language,” to quote one of the men in the class.
Crystal points out, however, that texting is hardly the first technological advance to be accompanied by prophecies of doom for language: “Ever since the arrival of printing—thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people’s minds—people have been arguing the new technology would have disastrous consequences for language. [What turned out to be unfounded] scares accompanied the introduction of the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting.” More, he points out that within the context of the “multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life [the] trillion text messages [that are sent] appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language.” Hardly something with the power to destroy the infrastructure of any of the world’s languages.
What I enjoyed the most about Crystal’s essay was his illustration of how the abbreviations people use in texting are nothing new, that they are, rather, a further development of linguistic “processes used in the past.” How different, for example, is lol or ttyl from the swak (sealed with a kiss) that the girls I went to high school with often wrote at the end of letters or notes? Nor is it true that we are the first generation to worry that abbreviations such as those used in texting are somehow indicative of lower-class sensibilities. In 1711, Crystal points out, Joseph Addison inveighed against the abbreviations of his time, pos for positive, for example, or incog for incognito. And Crystal quotes no less a canonical writer than Jonathan Swift, who though that abbreviating words was a “barbarous custom.”
The most fascinating paragraph in Crystal’s essay, however, is the one in which he talks about the growing body of evidence which suggests that texting helps rather than hinders literacy.
An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies had been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children’s ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.
While this may at first seem counterintuitive, if you think about it, it makes sense—though you do first have to recognize that textisms are created through a systematic and rule-governed process and are not random changes wrought willy-nilly on language by people who don’t know any better. Once you recognize that—and I admit it is not self-evident; Crystal does a decent job of making it clear—it is not hard to understand, I think, that someone who is proficient in text language is also going to be someone who is comfortable with language in general, understands how it works, and why and when and where it is appropriate and necessary to deviate from the standard.
I am not fully persuaded by Crystal’s argument—I would need to read the studies he talks about, for example—but he has convinced me that texting is not the simplistic linguistic phenomenon I used to think it was, and I am interested to hear how my students react to the ways in which he takes on their own prejudices. I am also very aware that while his essay is a wonderful exploration of the linguistics of texting, he says next to nothing about its social and cultural implications beyond language. In our discussion today, for example, and in every discussion I have had with classes about texting for the last couple of semesters, students talked about knowing someone whose boyfriend or girlfriend—who was not far away at the time—broke up with them by text. To me, that phenomenon is troubling, but it is also the subject of a very different post.
Cross posted on Because It’s All Connected
I’d argue that language like “raping our vocabulary” is far worse than any textspeak.
It occurred to me when I was on usenet that a lot more people were going to be writing to each other, and that English was going to get some changes as a result.
I think writing to convey information is important– and there’s no way to get the same experience by writing things for a teacher who already knows the material.
‘u’ for “you” or even for “You” is utterly clear. I reserve my impulse to correct for people who say “jive” when they mean “jibe”. To be fair, I don’t seem to be in venues where text is in common use. Maybe I’d be aggravated by it if I had to deal with it.
There was a submission-based blog I used to read pretty regularly that started to attract a much younger set of readers and writers, and you could see the influence of texting in many of the submissions as the blog gained a larger following. I found many of the newer entries extremely difficult to read. It wasn’t the abbreviations. It was the total lack of punctuation or capitalization. It was very difficult to parse the sentences. Maybe their essays were perfectly clear to other people from that age and class demographic. I suspect, though, that a lot of the shorthands from texting and the very casual touch with punctuation are better suited to short messages between people who know each other and have a pre-existing context for the conversation. I don’t think I’m just being a Luddite when I say that, for longer form writing, some of the conventions of texting start to seriously interfere with communication.
As you and many readers here know, ancient Hebrew had no vowels, no punctuation and no indicators of when sentences begin and end. It also didn’t have the dots that today allow us to distinguish p/f, b/v, s/sh, t/s. My understanding is that that was pretty typical for early written language in the Near East. Writing was more like a mnemonic device than an actual rendering of speech. On the one hand, it’s amazing how much you can communicate like that. On the other hand, it’s the source of some of the Bible’s tremendous ambiguity. Move a period so that a clause goes to a different sentence, and you get a very different meaning. We developed vowels and punctuation and clear ways to mark off sentences for a reason. It enhanced communication.
Amanda wrote a great post a while back on Pandagon that I think applies here:
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/the-perils-of-being-a-luddite
The gist of it is that it is a common fallacy for people to consider what they grew up with to be acceptable, and subsequent deviations from that to be scary change that will ruin everything.
There’s nothing inherently scary or wrong about textese. I think it is easy to forget that the point of communication is, well, communication. Rules are there to facilitate communication, not to make people who know the rules feel good about themselves. If you break the rules and still communicate perfectly well, then it’s pretty safe to say that that particular rule wasn’t super useful in that particular situation.
Of course, there will always be people who don’t know when it’s appropriate to bend the rules and do things like put text speak in their formal essays. But that’s nothing new. People have been making mistakes like that since communication was invented.
Chingona:
Forgive me, but I don’t have the time hunt down where in the article Crystal says this, but he does point out that the overwhelming majority of texts do not use abbreviations and that, as texting becomes more and more a part of our professional and commercial lives, it follows more and more the conventions of standard spelling and pronunciation. In other words, his point is that “textese” is most appropriate precisely in the context you describe.
On another note, I’d be interested, if anyone has had a chance to read Crystal’s article, to hear what you all think about texting poetry contest he talks about. I have a fascinating discussion about it in class today, though I don’t have time right now to say more than that.
Mmm… where I’ve seen that, it’s been primarily in relationships with power imbalances. Especially when a woman breaks up with a man that way it seems to be because there’s fear of how he’ll react when recieving the news, and more than a little fear of physical retaliation.
YMMV, the plural of anecdote is not data, etc.
That’s interesting, Howard. My class discussions haven’t lent themselves to exploring the issue along those lines, and the stories the students have told don’t sound like the kind of situation you describe, but I’m hearing the stories second, if not third or more hand, and so who knows what really happened. In any event, this is something for me to be aware of the next time the conversation happens–as I am sure it will. Thanks.
In examples of advances of technology being immediately followed by prophecies of doom for language, how about Socrates predicting the doom of free thought itself if people ever started using this new fangled thing called “writing” for anything other than grocery lists? It’s my favorite example of that this phenomenon at least. Myself and many others are infinitely grateful that Plato never took that particular lesson to heart.
-Jeremy
I don’t know if this is really about linguistics entirely, or at least about t. To some degree I think that the problem is at a higher level: it arises because young students haven’t yet mastered the ways that different communication choices convey–irrespective of their actual content–meaning due to form. In an odd way this is more social than language based. Students these days seem to be less tied in to awareness of the social mores of the older generations. (Kids always have always rebelled, and pissed off the adults. But I’d argue that kids in the old days were more aware of what the grownup rules were than they are today, even if they violate them equally.)
Texting or using shorthand language in an English paper is part and parcel of the same misunderstanding that drives students to drop by unannounced and “see if I’m hiring” at my law office. All of the students who do so are obviously smart enough to learn that this isn’t appropriate, but they just don’t know it yet.
Why isn’t it appropriate? I can see why coming and SAYING that’s what you’re doing is inappropriate; any lawyer who just comes out and says what they want is either as dumb as a rock or is Satan running a long con. But is it wrong to say “hey, I’m in the lobby, was passing by your building and thought of that great pro bono summation you gave for such and such, got a minute to shoot the shit?”
And then come up and sound you out, civilly, for a job?
As for “the kids today, they don’t even know the rules they’re breaking, not like the kids we used to have, those kids were way superior in their inferiority” thing…nah. I’m going to apply my 20 ranks in Cynicism, use my Improved Greater Cynicism Feat, and also play a munchkin card to force-roll a 20, in order to Megacynicize the whole “good old days” thing. The kids were never better than they are now. Nothing fundamental EVER changes. From the time of the pyramids until the time of the Alpha Centauri generation ship launch, kids have been and will be stupid and disrespectful, elders have been and will be grumpy and judgmental, and all progress has been and will be made by tiny groups of freaks toiling, sometimes in isolation, sometimes under giant handicaps, to do cool stuff in a way that makes their brains go PING.
Nothing said or done by people whose brains don’t go PING will have the slightest long-term impact or bearing on this process. It Pings when it comes Pinging time.
(I am not accusing you of being a non-Pinger. There is no shame in not being a Pinger, and no tremendous merit in being one; it’s a fraction of a percent of the species and it’s probably luck of the draw gene-wise plus luck of the draw environment wise. Fair? Fair don’t enter into it. Hedy Lamarr was the hottest chick in the 20th century, and also a brilliant engineer. Sucks for the normals.)