Txting Is Killing
Language.. JK!!!
By John McWhorter
We always hear that
texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of
any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people
in the US and now the whole world today. In another way, texting is actually a
miraculous thing, not just energetic. One thing that we see is that texting is
not writing at all.
Basically, if we think
about language, language has existed for perhaps a hundred thousand years ago
and it arose as it speech. Writing is something that came along much later.
According to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then
writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m. that’s how much of a latterly thing
writing is.
Writing has certain
advantages. When we write, because it’s a conscious process, because we can
look backwards, we can do things with language that are much less likely if we’re
just talking. For example, a passage from Edward Gibbon’s “ The Decline and
Fall of The Roman Empire .“
Casual speech is
something quite different. Linguists have actually shown that when we’re
speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of
around seven to ten words. we’ll notice this if we ever have occasion to record
ourself or a group of people talking. Speech is much looser, it’s much more
telegraphic. Actually, language is speech not language written that we
naturally tend to think.
Now of course, as
history has gone by, it’s been natural for there to be a certain amount of
bleed between speech and writing. For example, in a distant era now, it was
common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. The kind of
speech that we see someone giving in an old movie where they clear they throat,
and they go ,”Ahem, ladies and gentlemen,” and then they speak in a certain way
which has nothing to do with casual speech. It’s formal.
Well, if we can speak
like writing, then logically it follows that we might want to, also sometimes
write like we speak. The problem was just that in the material, mechanical
sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials
don’t lend themselves to it. It almost impossible to do that with our hand
except in shorthand, and then communication is limited.
Once we have things in
our pocket that can receive that message, then we have the conditions that
allow that we can write like we speak. And that’s where texting comes in. And
so, texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters
or punctuation when one texts.
What texting is,
despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call
writing, is fingered speech. That’s what texting is. Now we can write the way
we talk, and it’s a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that
still it represents some sort of decline. In this new kind of language, there
is new structure coming up such “ LOL “ which indicated different meaning for
some people and used in a very particular way .
So, the way Mr. Whorter
thinking of texting these days is that what we’re seeing is a whole new way of
writing that young people are developing. And so texting actually is evidence
of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of
course, but it’s an expansion of their linguistic reportoire.
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