Ye Olde Texting

The English alphabet has not always been the 26 familiar letters we use today. In the fourteenth century, for example, we used a letter called thorn, which was printed like þ, and was pronounced like modern day th-. When English printers adopted presses from Germany, they didn’t have a die for the letter þ because it didn’t exist in the German alphabet. English printers made do with the letter Y.

While language and technology have influenced each other down through the ages, technology today is reshaping language faster than the other way around. Many companies and people have claimed to be the first to send an SMS (short message service) message, but it is widely believed that Edward Lantz sent the first SMS by a Motorola beeper in 1989. This originally was designed for business people who needed to have an “office” in their hands at all time — and turned into the fastest and most preferred form of communication. But one problem people were facing was that SMS allowed only a maximum of 160 characters for input per message.

Due to this limit, people began to try to fit more words into less space. A popular way to do this was and still is to use Camelcase. With Camelcase, you take all the spaces out of a sentence in order to economize on your limited space. One example would be: “HelloHowAreYou?” Camelcase became widespread in the 1970s and 80s, when it began to be used in a lot of programming languages. But the problem in those days hardly was “mainstream,” as almost no one had a cell phone and PCs were just being invented.

Today, more than 1 billion people send text messages daily and the technology continues to make writing complete words and sentences cumbersome. In response, text users (i.e., almost all of us) are creating a new dialect of English — called Textese. Textese does not follow standard English grammar, and many of the words do not appear in any standard modern dictionary. But readers readily understand the language because it has become so common and is based on phonetics. For those readers who are older and can’t understand, I’m sure your teenagers can help you out.

The goal of Textese is to fit the most information in the smallest space and do it quickly. So, periods, commas, and capitalizations often are disregarded. An example of a common sentence in Textese would be “rotfl.” That’s “rolling on the floor laughing,” of course. Among the many words or phrases you won’t find in a dictionary are L8, nvm, Thx, and Ily ( late, never mind, thanks, and I love you).

Textese is considered unacceptable in school papers and formal documents around the world. Meanwhile in 2011 the Oxford English Dictionary added the phrases LOL (laugh out loud), OMG (oh my God), and ❤ to their dictionary. The 2015 Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year is the “face with tears” emoji (image above). With a rising number of people using these and others, how long can it stay that way?

My grandmother, wanting to improve my English, tells me “ain’t” is not in the dictionary. But, of course, it is.