Texting is a scourge, people said. They
believed that texting is the fall of serious literacy among young people in the
United States, even the world today. But actually, texting is a miraculous
thing. Basically, we think about language, that has existed for at least 80.000
years. Talking is the way we used language the most. Writing is something that
came along much later and we don’t know exactly when that happened. So, the
first one is speech and after that, writing comes along.
Writing has certain advantages, such as,
you can do things with language that are much less likely if you’re just
talking. For example, look at a passage by Edward Gibbon, “The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire” . That’s a beautiful passage, but no one talks that way.
We used casual speech instead of the formal one in our daily.
You can speak like you writing. For example
when someone give a speech, they became formal. That’s what people did then,
speaking like writing. But after that, you also want to write like you speak.
And then there was manual typewriter, electric typewriter and now we have
computer keyboard. You can type easily to keep up the pace of speech and later
you have to have someone to receive your
message quickly. We have smartphones. This allows us to write like we
speak. And that’s when texting comes in.
But texting is very loose in its structure, no one cares about the capital
letters or punctuation. But, you also don’t care about that when you speak.
So, texting is fingered speech. We write
the way we talk. But we see this general bagginess of the structure and lack of
concern with rules, and then we feels something is wrong. In this new kind of
language, there is new structures coming up. For example, the word LOL which
means “Laughing Out Loud” theoretically, but actually no one’s laughing.
Another example is slash (/). We used it in
the lines of “We’re going to have a party /(slash) networking sessions”. But
now, young people used it to change the scene or the topic of conversation. But
in real life, there are ways to do it gracefully. You can’t do that when you’re
texting.
