If you're going to write a column about text messaging, I know it's the done thing to use the lingo (as in the best-selling guidebook WAN2TLK: ltl bk of txt msgs). Sorry.
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I am not one of the world's great text messagers. Until last week, I had a mobile phone that was so big, basic and ancient that people started asking 'Is that a WAP phone?'. (Answer: no, it's a crap phone.) I am also, I suppose, too grammatically old-fashioned for my age. I like words; I like sentences; I like punctuation. Even as a teenager, I had misgivings about the Me 4 U graffiti, and suffered a nerd-like compulsion to correct it on school toilet walls.
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But I cannot get into this idea, promoted by Dr Ken Lodge of the University of East Anglia, that text messaging is destroying literacy. Dr Lodge claims that, by abbreviating the English language to the extreme and by substituting numbers for letters, we can lose sight of what it means to read and write properly (1).
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'I think it's a weird way to communicate', said Dr Lodge. 'Inevitably it'll affect the way people talk to each other.' He points out that 'there are already problems with university students with their inability to write English. The more people use it, the less they'll be aware of different styles of communicating'.
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There is a temptation here to point out that if Dr Lodge's grasp of grammar is anything to go by, students may be better off without it (although maybe the issue is the way the reporter has paraphrased his comments - which could support Dr Lodge's argument). In either case, the question is: what are we really talking about here? Is the technology the problem - or something else?
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That young people don't know no grammar is fairly obvious. My education in English grammar stopped with nouns (being words), verbs (doing words) and adjectives (describing words). What grammar I did learn came through modern languages; and that only happened because frustrated French language assistants could not believe our ignorance. Even now, I can tell you what the pluperfect of a French verb is, but defining the pluperfect tense itself? Forget it.
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But the grammar issue is about education. Teachers have not taught it - with the consequence, as many commentators have remarked, that when young teachers are forced to teach grammar through the UK National Literacy Scheme, they don't even know what they are supposed to be teaching. Even if grammar is high on today's government's list of educational priorities, it is suffering from having been educationally unfashionable. Nothing to do with mobile phones.
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In any case, text messaging has very little to do with grammar. If young people write a bad letter, you can tell they are grammatically deficient. Text messaging, by contrast, is just note writing. If I leave a note for my husband reading 'GONE 2 SAINSBRY J', I do not expect him to criticise the lack of paragraph breaks (or anything else - after all, who's cooking?). It might not be poetry - but it gets the point across.
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Brendan, my colleague on spiked, is trained as a proofreader. The result? He sends terrible text messages: all proper words, in sentences with full stops, which take you forever (4eva?) to read. Just as I have bought a slinky new mobile phone, which might encourage me to get into text messaging, my colleague Helene (the original IT girl - she's had the same model for months) tells me that the phone turns your text messages into proper words. Regardless of how succinctly and numerically I write, everybody receiving my messages will think I am doing a Brendan. Damn.
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I do have to confess to a formality-fetish with email. I thought my penchant for using a proper form of address, and always including a sign-off, made me infinitely superior to the people who reply to my carefully crafted emails with statements like 'OK'. But then somebody told me about a colleague of his, who maintains that anybody who writes emails as though they were letters obviously has too much time on his hands. Fair enough.
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There is a problem with people's use of text messaging and email - but this is about sloppiness, not grammar. Email might be more like memo-writing than letter-writing; but while it is good to be succinct, whatever you write has to be comprehensible. people who write an unpunctuated stream of consciousness with no capital letters excEpt for those in tHE WRong places and words spelt worngly should as far as im concerned be lined up against a wall and given a damn good talking to by their least favourite ex-schoolteacher.
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Email is supposed to ease communication - not make the recipient spend hours with a dictionary, wondering 'What the hell is this supposed to say?'. Be informal, if you like; be efficient, certainly. But if any of this is going to benefit us, in work or socially, other people need to understand what we are saying. Otherwise we'll all be climbing the walls of a modern-day Tower of Babel.
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Read on:
Generation Txt: mixed messages by Andrew Calcutt
(1) Reported in The Guardian, 22 January 2001
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