Short and sweet
Lloyd Evans
TXTING: THE GR8 DB8 by David Crystal OUP, £9.99, pp. 239, ISBN 9780199544905 ✆ £7.90 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 What do you make of this texting business? It took me on a surprisingly complex journey. First I felt revulsion, then doubt set in, then I sensed a developing acceptance and finally I embraced it with utilitarian enthusiasm. At one point I was even touched by a Shavian zeal that texting might usher in a new universal shorthand which would simplify and accelerate communication. Not that I wanted conventional spellings eradicated. A word’s spelling is an encryption of its history. But I was tempted by the prospect of an alternative orthography so we cd typ thgs lke ths 2 ch othr. It’s doubtful this will ever happen as David Crystal’s entertaining book argues. The emergence of texting was greeted by hysteria in the press. ‘Bleak bald bad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk,’ huffed the Guardian in 2002. Others worried that texting would ‘rape’ the language. Certainly its popularity took everyone by surprise and the market is now worth over $700 bn dollars a year, three times the box office receipts for Hollywood movies. It appeals because it combines several virtues at once. It’s quick, instant, intimate, succinct and cheap. You can text in circumstances averse to any other form of communication, in a thumping nightclub or ‘whilst holding on to the roof-strap of a crowded bus’.
According to Sandra Barron of the New York Times, texts have
the immediacy of a phone call, the convenience of an answering machine message and the premeditation of email. And if they happen to be from a crush and pop up late at night they have the giddy readability of a note left on a pillow.
What angered the press and its tribe of reactionaries was the multiple use of abbreviations in text messages. But there’s nothing novel, let alone scary, about shortening phrases like, for example, Rest in Peace and so on. I could have written the last eight words, ‘eg RIP etc’ and no one would have broken into a sweat. The much-vaunted panic about schoolkids quoting Hamlet with ‘2b or nt 2b’ also turns out to be groundless, partly because these abbreviations save negligible quantities of energy, and partly because texting exists only because it varies from the established conventions in ways that are entirely predictable. Far from being a playground for lazy half-wits, texting is a self-contained and highly conventional idiom that has stimulated fresh forms of expression. There’s no chance that it could become viral and destroy the language. And having defused that time bomb, Crystal sets off on a pleasing tour of the highways and byways of texting. Abbreviations aren’t used by all texters. The Samaritans receive SMS messages from depressives, ‘H8 my lyf. Hav 0 m8s. Wnt 2 di’, and they reply using ‘full English spelling’ to avoid misunderstandings.
GBS would have enjoyed texting. Martin Amis is a fan and deployed texts to great comic effect in his novel Yellow Dog. And Evelyn Waugh left evidence that, given the chance, he’d have texted like a hoodie on crack. Here’s a telegram to his agent refusing an interview with an impoverished broadcaster. ‘BBC LSD NBG EW.’ Crystal is a sophisticated, open-minded tour guide but even he rambles a little. The book closes with a 40-page texting dictionary aimed at a rather improbable range of international emergencies. Got a date with Claudia Schiffer? Text ‘bbb’, a German abridgement of ‘see you later, baby’. Had a bust-up with your Welsh grandmother? Send ‘cdb9’, which means ‘Shut up, Gran’. Or if you wake up with amnesia in Prague surrounded by monoglot Czechs you’ll be able to text your carers with ‘csdd hosipa,’ which means ‘this is unavoidable but I can’t remember anything’. Don’t forget that.
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