i luv txt

By Jonathan Bert
The Extreme Moderate

January 26,2009

Do not read or send text messages while driving. Other than that, text away! What a fantastic method of communication; the impact of text is far reaching.

Once a person gets acquainted with text, the obvious advantages are convenience; you read and respond to text when you want to, no digging for ringing phones, and efficiency; text often works in places phone calls don’t. Also, if someone sends you a phone number, you end up with the number right on your phone, no need to search for pen and paper.

Less obvious is text’s potential to improve the English language. English is a mixture of several other languages, and has all kinds of weird rules and exceptions to rules, making things much more difficult than they need to be. English has slowly evolved over the years, but improvement has met resistance from anal-retentive types. I remember a newspaper column titled “Our Lively Language”, but the writer’s apparent mission was to make English as dead as Latin. And there are thousands like her. People that freak out if you put “I” before “E” after “C.” Why not just “I” before “E?” A much easier rule to reinforce. Just a few years ago, my child brought home a textbook that said plow was spelled plough! Maybe in jolly old England, but not in 20th century America! At that time, I had to explain that, on occasion, real life is different than what school tries to tell you. A tough but important lesson. If you ever used the word plough, people would wonder what pluff is. Or is it a ploff? Plew? Ploe? It’s the 21st century now, we need 21st century language.

I think text will speed up the process of making English more user friendly. Some of the habits developed during texting will spread to everyday use. Unnecessary letters will be discarded. Dumb will lose the dumb “B” and just be dum. Abbreviations will be bountiful, without a period in sight! Apostrophe? Wuts an apostrophe? The anal-retentive will lose control of their sphincters! (Sphincter will always be spelled sphincter.) Don’t like it? Tuff!

It does appear English is already compact; when looking at instructions in multiple languages, the English paragraph is frequently shortest. It can still be made more efficient. American English is already vastly different from pluperfect Queen’s English, and that is a good thing. The most powerful country in the history of the World should have it’s own language. The English don’t like change, Americans thrive on change; and figuring out how things should be spelled is a good change. Texting might help other languages, too. Do you think texters in France use the silent X? Do Germans capitalize every noun when they text? I have no idea how the Chinese text.

I butcher English with pleasure. If I butcher facts, I feel bad, I like to be factual. But English needs some serious surgery. So text, text, txt, and have a good nite.